Cultural institutions in Los Angeles sometimes bemoan the difficulty of cultivating generous donors who will help fund their operations. Over the last few years, the art collector Jarl Mohn, 72, has emerged as an exception.
He and his wife, Pamela, 71, recently gave 260 works from their collection of Los Angeles artists to be shared by three museums — Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). The gift also came with a $15 million to $20 million endowment for new acquisitions and expenses, in part so that works can travel to museums in other cities.
Last June, the Brick — the nonprofit visual art space formerly known as LAXART — opened its new home on Western Avenue in Melrose Hill, thanks in large part to a $1.25 million gift from the Mohns (although the couple gives jointly, Jarl is the driving force behind their collecting).
Last May, the Mohns gave the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles museum a $4.4 million naming gift that will almost single-handedly pay for the museum’s renovation downtown
The Mohns have also established a grant program through the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), which gives up to 20 emerging Los Angeles artists $5,000 each over five years — along with curatorial and production support — to help them create their first significant public presentation in Los Angeles County.
And since 2012, they have underwritten the Mohn Awards, which honor artistic excellence, in conjunction with the Hammer Museum’s important biennial exhibition, “Made in L.A.”
“I really believe that Los Angeles today is what New York was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, what Paris was in the turn of the century,” Mohn said in an interview at his art-filled Los Angeles home. “This is the spot.”
To be sure, Mohn is by no means one of the country’s largest donors, on the scale of, say, Eli Broad, the philanthropist who established his own museum that is expanding in downtown Los Angeles. But because he is giving to more modest institutions, Mohn’s largess goes a long way.
“Jarl is our patron saint,” said Hamza Walker, the director of the Brick. “He’s become the champion of our sector of small- and medium-size organizations, understanding the role they play in terms of working with local artists who are underrecognized or at an early place in their careers.”
Ann Philbin, the director of the Hammer Museum, said that Mohn’s impact on the cultural scene of Los Angeles over the past couple of decades has been “very significant.”
At its gala next May, the Phillips Collection in Washington will honor Jarl with its annual Duncan Phillips Award, which celebrates a leading collector and philanthropist. “Your understanding of how art, artists, and art organizations can positively impact society is demonstrated convincingly by the breadth and depth of your engagement with the Los Angeles art community,” said Jonathan Binstock, the Collection’s director and chief executive, in a letter to Mohn last month.
Mohn made his wealth in venture capital, after a long career in radio and television. He founded and ran E! Entertainment and Liberty Digital, served as general manager and executive vice president at MTV and VH1, and was for several years the president and chief executive of National Public Radio.
Along the way Mohn developed a passion for art and artists and has decided to use his resources to champion that cultural ecosystem in Los Angeles.
“The top end of the market is not what I’m focused on — they don’t need my help,” he said. “I’m focusing on the pipeline. It’s really about the artists and the community in Los Angeles.”
A diminutive man who conveys a giddy enthusiasm — Johanna Burton, MOCA’s director, called him “a Pied Piper” — Mohn’s love for art is palpable. Walking through his elegant homes in Los Angeles and New York, the collector can offer a lengthy exegesis on every piece of art he’s acquired — where and when it was made, how it came to his attention, biographical details of the artist.
Mohn’s wife, Pamela, was the first to encourage them to fill their blank walls. “I said we need some art,” she said in an interview. “What I had in mind was cows in a pasture or figurative drawing.”
Jarl quickly focused on contemporary art and developed a passion that Pamela said she has supported. “He’s the one who would get so excited. I wouldn’t want to deny him that. I really respect it.”
His first art purchase was three photographs from Larry Clark‘s “Tulsa” series of drug users. “They’re so dark,” Mohn said. “I love dark stories, which is odd, because in my art I love light and space.”
He started out collecting works by artists from the minimalism movement — Agnes Martin, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. He added lesser known male artists like Douglas Huebler and Fred Sandback and then acquired largely overlooked female artists like Mary Corse and Carmen Herrera.
Later Mohn shifted his focus to works by Los Angeles artists. His New York apartment contains pieces by the likes of Beatriz Cortez, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Guadalupe Rosales, Rafa Esparza and Diane Severin Nguyen.
He said he has never sold anything. “My interest in art is not commercial,” Mohn said. “If I started looking at it that way — even if I just started doing it a little bit — it might color the way I think about it. So I don’t.”
He has developed personal relationships with some artists, like James Turrell, who designed an entire screening room for Mohn’s Brentwood home — including the furniture — and Lauren Halsey, who in 2018 received the Hammer’s Mohn Award of $100,000.
“The prize was life changing for me,” Halsey said. “I went from a garage in my grandmother’s backyard to a 5,000-square-foot studio.”
The Mohns have acquired a number of Halsey’s works, contributed funds for her 2023 Met roof installation and recently helped underwrite her current show at the Serpentine in London.
Mohn can be tenacious about acquiring a work he loves. Having helped LACMA pay for the sculptor Michael Heizer’s 340-ton boulder “Levitated Mass” in 2007, for example, Mohn wanted a similar piece for his own home. So he purchased a 3-¼ ton version that required him to do some major home construction.
“I had to remove the entire exterior wall, frame it in steel, dig down four feet, put in industrial rebar, concrete, let it cure for two weeks,” Mohn said. “Then we closed the street for three hours, craned it over the wall, wheeled it into place, bolted it into the concrete and drywalled around it.”
Mohn does not come from a long line of philanthropists and art collectors. He was raised in Bucks County, Pa., by a father who taught college English literature and wrote poetry about art and a mother who did textile design.
At age 11, Mohn said, he was placed in a foster home because his mother had been committed to a state mental institution and his alcoholic father was doing jail time for failure to pay child support. Radio was his refuge and he dreamed of becoming a disc jockey. At 15, he started working at a small radio station in Doylestown.
“It was all a matter of escapism,” he said, “because I hated the children’s home so much.”
He attended Temple University in Philadelphia to study mathematics and philosophy but flunked out for not showing up to class. He never graduated from college.
After many years as a disc jockey and then program director and general manager of radio stations, he went on to run MTV, VH1 and then E! in Los Angeles. One of the shareholders, John Malone from Liberty Media, asked Mohn to help build Liberty Digital, 24-hour interactive channels. The first investment was in priceline.com and then TiVo.
Eventually, Mohn became chief executive of NPR, taking a brief leave of absence in 2017 because of health problems (a ruptured aorta) just as the public radio network was dealing with a sexual harassment scandal, for which he apologized.
These days, Mohn spends most of his time engaged with art, which he said never gets old. “I always feel like I come away with something,” he said. “It’s a joy.”
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