LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Hammer Museum announced today that the Los Angeles biennial Made in L.A. 2016 will be co-curated by Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi and Hamza Walker from the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

Made in L.A. 2016 will be the third in an ongoing series of exhibitions focused on artwork created in the Los Angeles region and will be on view June through September 2016. The artist list will be announced in early 2016.

“Following the successes of our first two installments of Made in L.A., we are delighted to announce our curatorial team for 2016—our own Hammer curator Aram Moshayedi and Chicago-based Hamza Walker—bringing together rich regional and national perspectives to the next biennial,” remarked Hammer Director Ann Philbin. “We are thrilled to be working with them and looking forward to the summer of 2016.”

The Mohn Awards will also be presented in conjunction with Made in L.A. 2016. Funded through the generosity of Los Angeles philanthropists and art collectors Jarl and Pamela Mohn, the three awards are The Mohn Award, the Career Achievement Award—both of which will be selected by a professional jury—and the Public Recognition Award, which will be determined through a public vote.

Aram Moshayedi joined the Hammer Museum as Curator in July 2013 and has organized exhibitions from the Hammer Contemporary Collection focused on the work of Pentti Monkkonen, Hirsch Perlman, and Fischli/Weiss, as well as Hammer Projects: Mario Garcia Torres. His forthcoming Hammer Projects in 2015 include new works by Maria Hassabi, Avery Singer, and Simon Denny, and he is currently organizing a three-day exhibition focused on the creative work of artist bands, sound artists, and music collectives. He served as the associate curator of the Gallery at REDCAT from 2010–2013, overseeing the production and exhibition of new works by The Otolith Group, Slavs and Tatars, Jordan Wolfson, Tony Cokes, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Ming Wong, Erlea Maneros Zabala, and Geoffrey Farmer. He was also the co-organizer with Thomas Lawson and Stacey Allan of The Experimental Impulse, an exhibition and digital publication produced for the Getty Foundation’s citywide Pacific Standard Time initiative and served as an assistant curator on the 2008 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach. Moshayedi’s writings on art have been published in numerous exhibition catalogs and such publications as Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and Bidoun, for which he is also a contributing editor. 

Hamza Walker has been Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago since 1994. Recent exhibitions include Teen Paranormal Romance (2014), Suicide Narcissus (2013), and John Neff (2013). He is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2004 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2010 he was awarded the Ordway Prize for contributions to the field in the form of writing and exhibitions. Walker has contributed reviews and art criticism to New Art Examiner, Art Muscle, Dialogue, Parkett, and Artforum in addition to numerous catalogue essays on artists ranging from Heimo Zobering to Raymond Pettibon.