Hammer Museum announces curators for its next biennial, ‘Made in L.A. 2023’

The Hammer Museum has announced the curators for “Made in L.A. 2023.” L.A.-based independent curator Diana Nawi as well as curator, art writer and cultural theorist Pablo José Ramírez, who splits his time between London and Amsterdam, will organize the museum’s sixth biennial.

The multidisciplinary exhibition — spotlighting emerging and under-recognized L.A.-area artists and typically featuring painting, sculpture, performance, film and video, literature and music — likely will reflect cultural interconnectedness, something highlighted by the pandemic.

“The last two years have proven that despite distance and differences, we are more interconnected than we ever imagined,” Hammer Director Ann Philbin said in the announcement. “Made in L.A. focuses on Los Angeles artists but always draws on universal truths through a local lens. I’m excited to see how our guest curators, Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, will bring their vision to the next iteration of our biennial.”

The Hammer’s last biennial, “Made in L.A. 2020: a version,” curated by Myriam Ben Salah and Lauren Mackler, was installed at both the Westwood museum and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. It was supposed to premiere in June of that year but because of COVID, the exhibition was shuttered to the public for nearly a year. Works by 30 local artists sat in empty galleries in a wait-and-see limbo, the future uncertain. It finally opened in April 2021.

Nawi recently served as co-artistic director, with LACMA’s Naima J. Keith, for the citywide New Orleans exhibition “Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow.” Ramírez is the Tate Modern’s adjunct curator of First Nations and Indigenous art.

The curators soon will begin visiting artists’ studios as they organize the list of “Made in L.A. 2023” participants. The exhibition will run from Sept. 24 through Dec. 31, 2023.