Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) today announced the four artists selected to receive 2026 Mohn LAND Grants: Shana Hoehn, Angela Anh Nguyen, Harrison Kinnane Smith, and Adam Thompson. The grant provides each artist with a $5,000 honorarium as well as $5,000 of production funds towards the commissioning of a new work.
Developed in collaboration with art collectors and philanthropists Pamela and Jarl Mohn, the program is now in its fourth year.
Artists were nominated by current Mohn LAND Grant recipients, as well as other LA-based artists and curators. They were selected 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.
The curatorial team for the 2026 Mohn LAND grants included LAND director Laura Hyatt, deputy director Christopher Mangum-James, curator-at-large Bryan Barcena, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles assistant curator Paula Kroll. According to the curators:
âThis yearâs cohort of Mohn LAND grant recipients are outstanding examples of the innovative ways that artists in Los Angeles are thinking about site-responsive art. The projects that the grants will motivate span the gamutâfrom tree-bound, wooden sculptures that reference cheerleading culture, tufted canvases that focus on the cityâs response to the 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires, a pair of large-scale photography installations in the locker rooms of a public pool, and a multifaceted exploration of real estate investments in the neighborhoods of West Adams and Jefferson Park.
Despite their divergent mediums and practices, these artistsâ methodologiesâpositioning site as the nexus for artistic innovation and community involvementâmade them prime candidates for the 2026 Mohn LAND Grants.â
Founded in 2009, LAND is recognized for supporting artists who work outside of traditional models and who are deeply embedded in their communities. The initiative reflects LANDâs mission to empower artists to have autonomy over the presentation of their work and in more direct relationship with the public. The Mohn LAND grant has established itself as an important resource for artists in Los Angeles looking to find support for projects that operate outside of traditional institutional settings.
Curator Paula Kroll states: âSupporting emerging Los Angeles artists at pivotal moments in their careers, the Mohn LAND grants champion work that reflects the cityâs possibilities and challenges. These community-embedded projects invite reflection on how we engage with public space and foreground the power of everyday experiences.â
Mohn LAND Grants were introduced in 2023 as a new and ambitious initiative to invest in emerging Los Angeles artists by providing them with a platform to present site-responsive, transdisciplinary work across Los Angeles County. Past recipients of the Mohn LAND Grant include: Carlos Agredano, Jackie AmĂ©zquita, Susan Aparicio, Woohee Cho, Star Feliz, Lizette HernĂĄndez, Vincent Enrique Hernandez, Hannah Huntley, Maria Maea, yĂ©tĂșndĂ© á»lĂĄgbajĂș, Felix Quintana, and Daid Roy. These projects have been presented across Los Angeles, including sites such as the Los Angeles State Historic Park, Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Plaza Mexico, the Exposition Park Rose Garden, and Koreatown Plaza.
Mohn LAND Grants provide critical support, visibility, and context for an artistâs first major public commission. The 2026 Mohn LAND grant recipients will present their projects over the course of the next year.
2026 Mohn LAND Grant Recipients
Angela Anh Nguyen is an American textile artist whose work explores the complex relationship between online culture and the material world. Tufting collages that incorporate diverse media artifacts, she produces images that are simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary. Always tinged with a sense of humor, they encourage viewers to reflect on the absurdity of the present. Bringing together the digital and industrial, the personal and the political, Nguyenâs work presents a multifaceted meditation on modern life.
Shana Hoehn is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work in sculpture and drawing considers modes and conditions of agency, embodiment, and transformation. Hoehn's sculptural work combines traditional and digital fabrication techniques and employs various materials, including wood, sawdust, clay, bronze, and aluminum. Hoehn's work references a long and winding history of women contorting and the bodily destruction involved with transformation. Fragmented limbs, spines, and breasts morph into decorative architectural forms; braids swallow and are split open; trees give birth. Bodies become landscapes, and landscapes become bodies. These sculptural contortionists appear to levitate, fold, collapse, hatch, split, and splinter like eternally petrified shapeshifters. Animated by unseen forces, Hoehn's figures twist and bend in acts of refusal and self-transformation. Hoehn received her MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University in Sculpture and Extended Media and earned a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Harrison Kinnane Smith is an artist based in Los Angeles. His collaborative work and site-specific interventions critique public institutions and financial systems. He has been published by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and included in exhibitions at François Ghebaly and Melrose Botanical Garden galleries in LA; Romance Gallery and the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh; and SculptureCenter, NYC. Smith is a Co-Founder of PlaceHolder Gallery, LA and Affiliated Faculty and Co-Director of the Morning Star Research Center for the Afterlife of Slavery. He holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Adam Thompson is a Los Angeles based artist. He uses sculpture, installation, and lens-based media to investigate the cameraâs relationship to the phenomenology of perception. Referencing online pop culture and media, his work documents his personal search for individual agency. His practice merges contemporary technology with traditional fine art methods, linking progenitive history to todayâs questions of identity, power, and free will. Adam held a solo exhibition at Rabbit Rabbit in New York, collaborated at Gallery Kannski in Reykjavik, Iceland, and exhibited in LA-based group shows at The Box and O-Town House. He holds a BA in architecture from Yale University and an MFA in sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Photos courtesy of the artists.