Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha to Curate 2025 Made in L.A.

The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, has announced Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha as the cocurators of the seventh edition of the Made in L.A. biennial, to be held in the fall of 2025.

Harden is a curator at the California African American Museum and the organizer of theFocussection for this year’s iteration of Frieze Los Angeles. With Elizabeth Armstrong and Gilbert Vicario, they cocurated the 2022 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Pobocha until recently was a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she worked for sixteen years. Her most recent exhibition for MoMA, a retrospective of Thomas Schütte, will open there in the fall. She is the newly appointed Robert Soros Senior Curator at the Hammer.

No theme has yet been announced for the biennial, which is being is presented in collaboration with the California African American Museum, but Harden and Pobocha told Artnews that they are conducting research and making studio visits in advance of the event, focusing on emerging artists from their disparate vantage points, Harden being familiar with the city and its art scene, and Pobocha just having moved there. “We’re open to just seeing where LA lands,” Harden told the publication. “Because Made in L.A. is so time specific often—what is the snapshot in this precise moment as these two people in their own interest as curators—we are excited to approach it in that way.”

“There’s definitely no theme that we’re coming with or a ‘I want to prove this about Los Angeles,’” said Pobocha. “My training has always been that you start with the art object and see what it tells you. We’re looking at the work, not coming to it with any points to prove, other than the fact that this is a vital city with a lot of incredible artists working here.”