Mohn Art Collective: Hammer Museum, LACMA, and MOCA Collaborates with Frieze LA to Acquire Works by Edgar Arceneaux and Shaniqwa Jarvis
Left: Edgar Arceneaux, Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025. Silver nitrate, acrylic and glass on canvas. 80 x 120 x 3 in. Right: Shaniqwa Jarvis, Slowly, Surely, 2025. Archival digital print on silk and satin, custom rods, 60 x 40 in. Photos: Casey Kelbaugh, courtesy of Frieze
(Los Angeles, CA) – The directors of the Hammer Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, announced today the joint acquisition of Edgar Arceneaux’s Skinning the Mirror (Summer 1), 2025, and Shaniqwa Jarvis’s Slowly, Surely, 2025, to be added to the MAC3 collection, managed jointly by all three institutions.
The acquisition comes from a new, landmark acquisition fund created by the Mohn Art Collective: Hammer, LACMA, MOCA (or MAC3), in collaboration with Frieze Los Angeles. The fund, amounting to $75,000, were contributed by Los Angeles philanthropists Jarl and Pamela Mohn and Frieze.
Announced last year, the MAC3 collection is comprised of more than 350 artworks by Los Angeles-based artists, most of which were collected by the Mohns over the last 20 years. The original gift also includes an endowment for annual acquisitions as well as the care and storage of the collection. The co-owned collection is a groundbreaking model for institutional collaboration and commitment to directly supporting the artist communities of Los Angeles.
In Edgar Arceneaux’s ongoing Skinning the Mirror series, the artist paints, shatters, and strips salvaged mirrors, transferring their reflective surfaces onto paintings. This process creates tactile gestures that burnish and deepen with age as the silver nitrate absorbs elements of the atmosphere, altering its tone and color until sealed. Deeply personal and rich with metaphoric meaning, Arceneaux’s paintings not only absorb the invisible characteristics of their environs, but in their cracked reflections, materialize the fragmentary nature of self-understanding and the gaps and fissures embedded within broader sociohistorical narratives.
Shaniqwa Jarvis, known for her evocative and introspective approach to mixed media works and photography, bridges the personal and the universal, inviting viewers into a realm where memory, heritage, and interconnectedness converge. Slowly, Surely is part of her latest body of work, which explores the concept of reflection—a meditation on identity, legacy, and perception. Jarvis’s collages blend transparent and opaque fabrics—such as cotton, silk, and marbled prints—with C-prints and photographs captured across formats, from Polaroid to large-format. These intricate layers mirror the connections between individuals and the interplay of what is observed and internalized, painting a vivid dialogue between the seen and unseen, the tangible and ephemeral.
CONTINUED IN FULL RELEASE