The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has announced the winners of the three prizes it gives out for each edition of its Made in L.A. biennial.
Ali Eyal has won the Mohn Award, which comes with $100,000 and a Hammer-produced monograph on his work. Carl Cheng, who is in his 80s, won the Career Achievement Award, which comes with $25,000. Greg Breda was selected by public vote of visitors to the exhibition to receive the Public Recognition Award, which also comes with $25,000.
Eyal and Cheng were selected by a jury that included Gean Moreno, director of the Art + Research Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Margot Norton, chief curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and Daniela Lieja Quintanar, chief curator and deputy director of programs at REDCAT in Los Angeles.
Eyal is the youngest artist featured in the exhibition and is represented by only one painting, a 12-foot-wide canvas titled And Look Where I Went (2025). Born in Baghdad in 1994, Eyal grew up in Iraq during the US-led invasion of the country. He made And Look Where I Went after visiting the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan for the first time in 2024, he told Hyperallergic. The resulting painting a frenzied scene in which people cower in fear, various car and buildings look burned out, and the sky is a fiery red-orange. Being at the 9/11 Memorial caused the artist to relive the violence he had experienced as a child, adding, “It’s still happening, it’s ongoing.”
In a joint statement, the jury said of Eyal, “Through a singular painterly language and personal lens, Ali Eyal engages experiences of war and displacement characteristic of the last quarter century. In his monumental paintings, drawings, and installations, incongruous perspectives and mismatched scales create expansive oneiric worlds in which geopolitical tragedies meet interior landscapes. Animated by a capacious emotional range, Eyal’s work is a testimony of perseverance.”
In addition to featuring in the 2025 edition of Made in L.A., Eyal will also show work in the upcoming 2026 Whitney Biennial. He has previously exhibited in the 2025 Mercosul Biennial, the 2023 Sharjah Biennale, the 2022 Carnegie International, and Documenta 15 in 2022.
Eyal has already given an indication of what he might do with a sum of money as large as the Mohn Award, which is unrestricted. In an interview with Cultured, he said he would recreate his father’s car, which was burned by Allied Forces shortly after his father disappeared, as a sculptural installation.
“The car was the most expensive possession we had; selling it would have kept us afloat as we sought to move,” he said. “Rebuilding my father’s car would become a form of compensation through art for my mother, who carried the greatest losses after his disappearance and the destruction of the only hope she had to continue the journey.”
Cheng has on view over a dozen works in Made in L.A., the majority of which date to the 1970s and ’80s. One of the most alluring works was more recent, a 2006 wall-hung piece titled Anthropocene Landscape 3. For that work, Cheng affixed circuit boards—in different shades of greens and browns—to a piece of aluminum to create an abstract composition that resembled an aerial view of farmland.
Cheng is best-known for his long-term engagement with new technology to create art. He was recently the subject of the first in-depth survey of his work from the 1960s to the present, which debuted at the Contemporary Austin in 2024, before traveling to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and then internationally. It is currently on view at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland.
In a statement, the jury said of Cheng, “For over sixty years, Carl Cheng has maintained a highly active and idiosyncratic practice, dealing with questions of authorship, ephemerality, technology, and the relationships between the natural and synthetic. Through uncompromising experimentation and continually inventive processes, he has built a truly groundbreaking body of work. This Career Achievement award recognizes Cheng’s visionary contributions and historical importance.”
Breda is represented by seven paintings presented together in one of the exhibition’s spaces. The works, all dated to 2025, show Black people in different scenes of leisure, often with flowers depicted in the background. Over 900,000 visitors have been to Made in L.A. since it opened in October, all of whom could have cast votes for an artist participating in the exhibition.
This edition’s co-curators, Essence Harden and Paulina Pobocha, said in a statement of Breda, “Greg Breda’s paintings are both luminous and reverent, marked by a spiritual clarity that centers Black interiority, care, and transcendence. His work channels an enduring quietude, capturing moments that feel at once timeless and deeply grounded in the light and flora of Los Angeles. His contribution to Made in L.A. 2025 embodies both grace and resolve, offering a meditative reflection on the presence and sanctity of Black life.”
