Mohn LAND Grants
Announcing Mohn LAND Grants, a new and ambitious initiative to introduce, and invest in, emerging Los Angeles artists, providing them with a platform to present site-responsive, transdisciplinary work across Los Angeles County and to serve as a first formal public presentation. Over a five year cycle (2022-2027), up to 20 artists will receive Mohn LAND Grants to realize intentional and community-focused public projects ranging from large-scale sculpture commissions to street level interventions. The initiative reflects LAND’s mission to empower artists to have autonomy over the presentation of their work and in more direct relationship with the public. Founded in 2009, LAND is recognized for supporting artists who work outside of traditional models and who are deeply embedded in their communities. Mohn LAND Grants was developed in collaboration with art collectors and philanthropists Pamela and Jarl Mohn, who are committed to supporting emerging L.A. artists.
Mohn LAND Grants is a new, five year cycle of support for emerging artists in L.A. County who work site-responsively and who have yet to receive major institutional support and/or gallery representation. Artists are selected by a curatorial committee at LAND and based on a criteria of artistic excellence, a depth of community engagement, and the potential of the support to elevate their career at this moment in their overall practice and progression. Artists of all mediums are considered. An inaugural 2022 cohort will each receive grants of $5,000 and a significant level of curatorial and production support to realize their first significant public presentation in L.A. County in 2023.
“I am madly in love with what is happening in the art community of our Los Angeles, particularly with emerging artists who are experimenting and being adventurous,” said Jarl Mohn. “A unique strength of LAND is the investment in artists whose work is collaborative, community-driven, and energizing. We look forward to introducing new artists and a very engaging multi-year cycle of art and public programs.”
The inaugural cohort of Mohn LAND Grant recipients produce outstanding, socially concerned, transdisciplinary work across a range of disciplines, mediums, and modes, addressing issues such as extraction and exploitation of natural resources to narratives of migration and oppression of gendered and racialized peoples.
Maria Maea (b. 1988, Long Beach, CA) is a Samoan-Mexican American artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses film, sculpture, and performance. Her work investigates the “brown body’s (dys)function as capitalist commodity, as a resistance to somatic fixity, an examination of the multiplicities of consciousness, and survival as immigrants and first generation Americans.” LAND is supporting Maea to realize a large-scale sculpture to be sited at the Los Angeles State Historic Park as part of “Gatherings,” an ongoing exhibition series that constellates artists who weld ritual, myth, ancestral knowledge, and/or communal practices to navigate and reimagine the world.
Felix Quintana (b. 1991, Lynwood, CA) is a first generation Salvadoran-American visual artist and educator. He received an MFA in Photography from San Jose State University and a BA in Studio Art from Cal Poly Humboldt. Quintana’s work spans photography, digital media, and collage. Solo exhibitions include Residency Art Gallery, Cypress College, and SOMArts Cultural Center. Select group exhibitions include LAXART, Vincent Price Art Museum, Center for Photography Woodstock, San Jose ICA, SFSU Art Gallery, and Arion Press, among others. His work has been featured in The Guardian, NPR, Los Angeles Times, KCET, Hyperallergic, and Art News, among others. His work can be found in the permanent collections of Oakland Museum of California, Altamed Art Collection, and Cal Poly Humboldt. Quintana lives, works, and teaches in Los Angeles. LAND will commission Quintana to create a series of street-level interventions, reinterpreting the artist’s unique visual vocabulary as physical collages of everyday vernacular of Southeast LA, and a series of community workshops.
Jackie Amézquita (b. 1985, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala) migrated to the U.S. in 2003. Her work explores narratives of migration and how people navigate power structures and unites performances, site specific activations, installations and organic materials such as masa, soil, salt, hydrated lime, and produce to explore a visual language that investigates modes of adaptation, and integration in the aftermath of migration. LAND will present the artist’s “Gemidos de La Tierra (Wailings of the Land/Soil),” a body of work that integrates two Lists of Deaths in ICE Detention Centers between 2003-2017 and 2018-October 2023. LAND, in partnership with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), will install the works on trucks and caravan them across Los Angeles to sites currently being used as detention centers, “giving voice to those no longer with us, in a way embodying them and providing them the journey they were not able to complete.”
Star Feliz (b. 1992, New York, NY, Lenapehoking) is an interdisciplinary artist and medicine person with roots in Ayiti, or the Dominican Republic. Their work spans sculptural installation, time based media, and book forms that explore “earth-based pathways for disarming apparatuses of violence and their cycles of trauma.” LAND will support the artist to undertake their first large-scale public work, “In the Belly of the Serpent.” An adobe built serpent, recalling earth mounds made by ancient civilizations, will embody the cycle of rebirth and offer healing gateways for new stories. A companion website will invite the public to imagine rituals for earth healing from wherever they are in the world.
Photo by Star Montana.
