Jarl Mohn’s Landmark Gift to Museums

Janelle Zara In your collection you have a piece that I love: one of Robert Irwin’s discs. Can you tell me a little bit about when and how you acquired it? 

Jarl Mohn Sure – it’s actually got a good backstory. Years ago, when I started building the minimal light and space collection, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles had a gala and they asked me if I would be willing to have an artist sit at our table. I said I’d love that and they suggested Robert Irwin. I was thrilled; at the dinner, we were chatting and he asked me what I collected. I said, ‘Well, I’m starting to build a light and space collection.’ He asked, ‘What do you have of mine?’ I had to admit I had nothing and he said, ‘What kind of collection is that?’ 

I’ve always loved LA. When I had the chance to move here, I jumped at it. Jarl Mohn

I had actually wanted to buy a disc about two years earlier from Pace, but then they sent me three pages of instructions for lighting it, and I could not find a place where it would have worked. It killed me. He said, ‘There are no instructions. I have collectors that have not lit them and they look great.’ I felt terrible. Two years went by and I was at an art fair; I saw a disc and I ended up buying it. It turned out to be the same piece – someone had bought it and flipped it. I ended up paying twice as much for it. I also have one of his 19-foot acrylic columns. 

JZ Did you get to know Irwin well? 

JM I wouldn’t say very well, but I spent a little bit of time with him. I was the chair of the American Civil Liberties Union [ACLU] of Southern California for 13 years. He was very interested in civil liberties and social justice. He did not want to talk to me about art, he wanted to talk to me about the ACLU. Then, years later, I became the CEO of NPR and he loved NPR. So his interest in me was not as a collector so much but in the pro-social work I was doing. 

JZ You didn’t begin as a light and space collector. What sparked that interest and how did you begin with your first light and space acquisitions?

JM I think, like many collectors, when I started out I didn’t know exactly what it was that I wanted to collect other than it being contemporary work. I tried to do a fair amount of reading about collecting, and the most persuasive argument I found was that a good collection really should have a theme, a through-line of some sort. I knew that I wanted a collection that stood for something. The very first works I bought were some Larry Clark photographs from the ‘Tulsa’ series [1963–71]. That was in 1991. The next eight to ten years, it was a little of this, a little of that, and there was no theme. I figured sooner or later the idea would hit me, but I wasn’t going to force it and pick something at random. Years later, I ended up buying a John McCracken outdoor stainless-steel work called Triton [2000]. Once I had installed it, I thought: Okay, now I know – I want to collect work at the intersection of minimalism and light and space. Now we have a little bit of land art, too, where it all converges. 

Once I had made the decision, it was much easier to focus. At the time, James Turrell, Irwin, Mary Corse, Doug Wheeler, McCracken and Peter Alexander weren’t commanding super-high prices, so we were able to assemble a pretty good collection of their work. 

JZ You said that you were reading about collecting. What were you reading, and what kind of guidance did you have? Did you have mentors? 

JM I talked to a number of collectors: Dean Valentine, who I knew from the television business, and a guy I worked with at MTV called Mark Rosenthal. Another person who was instrumental – and is controversial now – is Douglas Chrismas. Every time I would go by Ace Gallery to look at whatever exhibition they had up, Douglas would invite me into his office, and he would take books from the shelves, open them up and start talking to me about Donald Judd, Carl Andre, DeWain Valentine, Corse and the importance of California light and space. I don’t know why he talked to me about them, because I hadn’t expressed any interest in minimalism or light and space. I didn’t even know what they were, to be completely honest. But then, when I saw the McCracken piece in New York in 2000, everything came together.

JZ Something specific about that genre spoke to you. 

JM I might be trying to reverse-engineer the answer, I’m not completely sure, but my mother was a textile designer who made beautiful minimalist patterns. And then, during my very short career in college, before I was thrown out, I was a mathematics major, and I love math.

JZ Katrina, what was it like growing up with art? How do your and your father’s interests differ? 

Katrina Mohn He started seriously collecting when I was in my mid-teens, and some of the biggest acquisitions happened when I was in college, studying art history at the University of Southern California. I was on my own journey academically learning about Californian artists and Jarl was on his journey learning about Californian artists, too. We both claim to have influenced the other, but actually I think it was a back and forth. 

Like many collectors, when I started out I didn’t know what I wanted to collect. Jarl Mohn

JM Once Katrina went to graduate school, she would come back and say, ‘You don’t really understand this stuff.’

KM I started working for the Patricia Faure Gallery in Bergamot Station when I was in college and a lot of Cool School artists were hanging out there at the time: Ed Moses, Billy Al Bengston, Larry Bell, Peter Alexander and Craig Kauffman. I got to know all these guys and had friendships with a lot of them while seeing my dad collecting their work. That was something. 

JZ I read that you weren’t allowed to see his early Larry Clark acquisitions. 

KM I don’t know if he was ever actually allowed to hang them. One was a photograph of a pregnant woman shooting up, and one was a photograph of a dead baby in a coffin. So I never saw them growing up, but I heard about them, and eventually I did hang them in my apartment when I was a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They hung in my home here in Los Angeles for several years until I had a kid, and now they’re in storage again. 

JM I asked, ‘Katrina, why did these mean so much to you?’ She said, ‘First, it was the first artwork you bought. Second, I was not allowed to see them as a child, which made them very interesting to me.’ And, third, Katrina was born in Tulsa. 

JZ Full circle! Katrina, tell me about your role in the family collection now.

KM I think it began with me offering to put together a database of the collection, because, for a long time, we just had big binders with invoices of all the purchases. That took me a couple of years. Then I put together a book of all the works in my parents’ home in Los Angeles. First, all the minimalist works, then I started working more with the emerging-artist collection, making sure that everything’s documented and insured, dealing with loans – all the nitty-gritty stuff behind the scenes. Then I did a book for that part of the collection, which I updated this year. 

JZ How many pieces are in the collection?

KM For the emerging and underrec­ognized artists, probably just over 300. And for the minimal light and space, it’s around 65.

JZ Would you say the former is your sole focus now, or are you still collecting light and space as well as emerging artists?

JM In terms of acquisitions, light and space is probably not a priority now. I don’t have much from that collection in storage as I really like to have it on display, given the size, importance and cost of those works. If I found something that I thought was really juicy, that really added something, then I might jump on it, but I want things that are going to really make a difference. 

JZ What advice would you give to an aspiring collector, or maybe simply somebody beginning to take an interest in art, about how to get started?

KM The more you look at stuff, the more you’ll know what you like, the more you’ll know what you gravitate toward. It doesn’t have to be from a place of intellectualism, you can just like what you like, and not like what you don’t like. It doesn’t have to be about what other people say is good.

JM I think you have to look at a lot of art. People don’t want to do that. If they want to collect, they want to go out and just jump right in. In a sense, that’s what I did and it took me nine years to figure out what I really wanted to do. I come from the music industry; I was in radio for years, spent a lot of time at MTV and VH1. Music’s a very important part of my life. I used to think about music as the framework, the way I looked at other forms of art. The song that you really like immediately quite often tends not to wear very well. After you’ve heard it a number of times, it is just not the same. Some music, that’s a little more complex, a little harder to get, grows on us. Those are the songs and the artists that I think have longevity. I think the visual arts, in many ways, are the same. 

JZ I’d like to ask you about Michael Heizer.

JM I think we may have the only work from the ‘rock in a box’ series in the world installed in a residence. 

JZ The installation must have been a challenge. 

JM Boy, it took a lot of work, but it was really worth it. We were involved with the acquisition of Levitated Mass [2012] for Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Michael Govan and I took a number of trips to visit Heizer at City [1970–2022] in Nevada. The first time I went there, which I think might’ve been 2007, the piece we now have was outside his studio. I fell in love with it, but never really pursued it because of the amount of time, energy and crazy construction involved. It required us taking out an exterior wall of the house, reframing it in steel, jackhammering out a fireplace – which took five days – digging down four feet, putting industrial rebar in concrete, closing our street off for three hours, craning the work over a wall, wheeling it into place, bolting it into the concrete, and dry walling around it. 

I remember showing Heizer the pictures of the construction on my phone and he said, ‘Wow, that’s some commitment.’ It was a lot of fun. 

JZ You also have a James Turrell in your house.

JM He built a screening room for us, the only one he has done. 

JZ When did you transition to collecting younger artists? 

JM Lifelong learning is an important thing for our family. I had done my research, and learned about the major minimalist artists. Then I started learning and doing research about artists that were maybe not as well known as the key figures. I began adding some of those artists to the collection but, after a period of time, it became less about learning and more about detective work in terms of tracking down good pieces.

I’ve always loved LA. When I was living in New York and working for MTV, I used to fly out once a month. When I had the chance to move here, I jumped at it and was so excited to discover what was happening in the visual arts. I thought, well, maybe this is the next area of exploration for me. The first works for the emerging LA art collection were two drawings by Mark Grotjahn that I bought in 2006. 

More recently, I got involved with the ‘Made in LA’ biennial and set up the Mohn Artist Award in partnership with the Hammer Museum.

JZ What can you tell us about MAC3?

JM ‘Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA’, also known as ‘MAC3’, is our donation from our collection of LA artists to the three institutions together, with an endowment to continue to grow these shared holdings. I didn’t want to break the collection up and I was really inspired by the original iteration of Pacific Standard Time, when everybody worked together and loved doing so. I really think that’s the vibe of our city. So, the endowment will make sure that every year the institutions can pick work for the collection by artists that live and work in LA. There are going to be exhibitions every few years that travel nationally and internationally to show what’s happening here in LA. Hopefully, we will be able to continue to inspire and motivate artists to live and work here and be part of this community.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week Los Angeles under the title ‘Chip off the Old Block’.

Frieze Los Angeles x MAC3

Launching at Frieze Los Angeles 2025, Frieze Los Angeles in collaboration with the Mohn Art Collective: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MAC3) is a major new acquisition fund supporting artists who live and work in LA. The dedicated fund of $75,000 is for the MAC3 institutions to jointly acquire work or works by artists who live and work in LA at Frieze Los Angeles, which will become part of Los Angeles’s cultural legacy.

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^{Main image: Katrina and Jarl Mohn with John McCracken, Triton, 2000. Photo: Peyton Fulford}