Made in L.A., a biennial run by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, has named Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez as the curators of its 2023 edition, scheduled to open September 24 of that year and run through December 31.
Over the course of the five editions staged since its founding in 2012, Made in L.A. has garnered a reputation for spotting local artists who have been under-recognized in the national scene and boosting them to more widespread recognition. Among those to have shown at the biennial previously are Huguette Caland, rafa esparza, Lauren Halsey, EJ Hill, Candice Lin, and Kandis Williams.
Nawi is a Los Angeles–based independent curator who organized last year’s Prospect New Orleans triennial with Naima J. Keith. She is currently a guest curator at the Contemporary Austin in Texas. Among her curatorial credits are surveys of Michael Rakowitz, Adler Guerrier, and Mark Bradford.
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Ramírez is based in London and Amsterdam, and is currently an adjunct curator of First Nations and Indigenous art at Tate Modern. His work often “revisits post-colonial societies to consider race, indigeneity, and forms of racial occlusion,” according to his biography, and with Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, he organized the 2015 edition of the Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala. Ramírez is on the curatorial team of this year’s Carnegie International, a biennial being overseen by Sohrab Mohebbi (who was recently named director of SculptureCenter in New York).
Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, said in a statement, “Made in L.A. focuses on Los Angeles artists but always draws on universal themes 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 announcement comes as members of the international art world descend on Los Angeles for this year’s edition of the Frieze art fair, the first in the city since the start of the pandemic.