Akinsanya Kambon Receives 2023 Mohn Award
 
Pippa Garner and Jackie Amézquita Receive Career Achievement and Public Recognition Awards

Los Angeles, CA - The Hammer Museum is pleased to announce that Akinsanya Kambon will receive the $100,000 Mohn Award honoring artistic excellence, in conjunction with Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living. The museum will also produce a monograph of Kambon’s work as part of the Mohn Award. Pippa Garner will receive the Career Achievement Award honoring brilliance and resilience, and Jackie Amézquita will receive the Public Recognition Award, as chosen by visitors to the Made in L.A. 2023 exhibition. Garner and Amézquita will each receive $25,000.
 
Funded by Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, the Mohn Awards have been given to artists with each edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, which began in 2012.
 
Hammer Museum Director Ann Philbin said, “Akinsanya Kambon’s powerful ceramic sculptures are imbued with the stories of disturbing histories of colonization and subjugation. He is well overdue for this recognition, and I am so pleased he is receiving the 2023 Mohn Award. Likewise, Pippa Garner is immensely deserving of the Career Achievement Award as an artist who has been making provocative work for many decades. And there’s no arguing with the many visitors to Made in L.A. who voted for Jackie Amézquita—her work is an ambitious and powerful portrait of Los Angeles. I am incredibly grateful to Jarl and Pamela Mohn for their steadfast support of the Hammer and the artists of Los Angeles, through their funding of the Mohn Awards and their ongoing support for the Made in L.A. biennial.”
 
A jury of professional curators selected the Mohn Award and the Career Achievement Award. This year’s jury includes Essence Harden, visual arts curator and program manager at the California African American Museum; Ryan Inouye, Kathe and Jim Patrinos co-curator of the 59th Carnegie International and curator, International Art, at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; and Carla Acevedo-Yates, The Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the MCA Chicago.
 
In a joint statement about the Mohn Award winner, the jury said, “Akinsanya Kambon has developed a distinctive visual language that narrates episodes of violence, liberation, and revolution. His commitment to storytelling through form connects histories that span cities and continents through a Black diasporic and anti-imperialist lens. Through intricate ceramic vessels and wall reliefs that hold an intense emotional charge, the artist compels us to hold these complex histories close to the present as a call for radical social change and justice.”
 
In reference to the Career Achievement Award, the jury wrote, “Pippa Garner does not make distinctions between art and life, demonstrating a way of living and moving through the world in which the body is a site of transformation, pleasure, transgression, and play. Her wry and inventive sculptures, drawings, videos, and performances subvert social norms and the language of consumerism. This Career Achievement Award recognizes Garner’s decades-long practice that has cleared space for generations of artists working today.”
 
The Public Recognition Award was determined by visitors to the Hammer Museum. More than 60,000 people visited the exhibition in its first two months and had the opportunity to vote for their favorite artist in the biennial.
 
Remarking on Jackie Amézquita’s popular vote award, Made in L.A. 2023 co-curator Pablo José Ramírez stated: “Jackie is an artist committed to sharing and nurturing her diasporic experience as a Guatemalan immigrant, reverberating vigorously with a variety of audiences in Los Angeles and beyond. In her practice, Amézquita uses organic materials that change, grow and decompose, creating sophisticated works that speak to the practice of performance art, or minimalism as much as they do to the cultures and social histories they bear witness. The thousands of visitors to Made in LA 2023: Acts of Living decided the Public Recognition Award through their vote, and we were thrilled to learn about this result.”

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