Hammer Museum Awards Its Crowdsourced Art Prize

By RANDY KENNEDY

The people have spoken and the winner is: Meleko Mokgosi.

Mr. Mokgosi, a painter who was born in Botswana and who has lived and worked recently in New York, is the recipient of the inaugural Mohn Award, a prize given by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles whose winner is chosen, reality-television-style, by museumgoers, from a pool selected by art professionals.

The award, underwritten by Jarl Mohn, an art collector and a former MTV executive who helped found the E! network, and his wife, Pamela Mohn. It will provide Mr. Mokgosi, 30, with $100,000 over two years, and will include the publication of a monograph about his work, which often deals with contemporary political and social issues in Africa. A jury of curators selected him and four other finalists from among the 60 artists whose work is included in the exhibition “Made in L.A. 2012,” a new biennial that opened in June at the Hammer. Public voting on the award began June 28 and ended Sunday.

Other finalists included Simone Forti, Liz Glynn,Erika Vogt and the collective Slanguage, founded by the artists Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra Jr.