Constant changes to her environment were never new for Michaëla Mohrmann. She was born in Texas, yet places she would call home stretched across the United States, Latin America, and Europe. But it did not matter where she was in the world; she always saw the beauty around.
From the ‘California Kinship’ exhibition, Michaëla Mohrmann views the works she chose to put on display.
Art is a distinct part of her life. She first became aware of its significance around the age of 12, when her family moved to Montevideo, Uruguay, and resided for a little over five years. Her father worked in industrial architecture, and those several construction projects kept their family on the move. In less than two decades, Mohrmann, her mother, father, and brother lived across nine different places. At times, it felt like she was in constant motion, but art grounded her.
Mohrmann remembers when she saw Joaquín Torres García’s “Monumento Cósmico” for the first time. When her family visited the bright green scenery of Parque Rodó, the wall stood tall, waiting for her. In some parts, she could see the rose-colored granite peek through the foundation. Created in 1939, the elements have worn down the materials, but the engravings remain. It tells a story of human experience; a blend of cultures, beliefs, and creative techniques, within a single monument. This sculpture alone brought about a sense of familiarity to her changing world.
“I remember feeling a sense of warmth and gratitude that Torres García’s work was there as if welcoming us to our new host country,” said Mohrmann. “Its blend of European and ancient pre-Columbian forms reflected my own mixed heritage and seemed to foreshadow that Uruguay would become a true home to my brother and me, that we would finally fit in somewhere.”
That is what stood out to her the most — the way cultural richness and identity can be explored through artistic media. As a daughter of immigrants, her mother from Cusco, Peru, and father from the French Caribbean, her identity was unique and influential in the works she has explored in her career.
“I’ve always had a very global perspective on art. I’m French Peruvian. I have multiple nationalities. I speak three, well, four languages now,” said Mohrmann. “I’ve always been thinking about how I can use art to tell stories.”
Her passion did not begin with her alone; her mother’s brother was the Peruvian painter, Alberto Quintanilla Del Mar. His imaginative paintings and lithographs depicted a mythological fantasy — vivid colors painted on canvas depicted creatures, “sometimes with multiple heads and smoke erupting from their craniums and ears.” Such imagery frightened her as a child, but she now sees those paintings in a new light.
“I still live with his works now, though they no longer inspire fear but rather a deep sense of mystery and connection. Living with truly original and challenging art that elicited a strong response from me developed my curiosity about and respect for the power of art,” said Mohrmann.
Regardless of what reality art captures, ensuring that all perspectives are represented is significant.
“Artists are curious about all facets of society and culture,” said Mohrmann. “Art can help us get in touch with the very essence of what it is to be a human being. That’s how this has relevance for everybody.”
However, seeing this representation, especially in the States, was not always accessible when she first began studying art history at Harvard University in the early 2000s. “No classes were being taught on Latin American modern and contemporary art,” said Mohrmann. “I was not seeing any of those works in the museums in the Boston area, and I also was not seeing any courses examining that history or those artworks.”
Two years after she graduated with her bachelor’s in art history in 2007, she began looking into Master of Arts and PhD programs. In 2019, she graduated from Columbia University with a focus on modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on Latin American and Latinx art.
“I had grown up in places like Uruguay and the Dominican Republic, where I had seen incredible art, both by living artists, but also within the museum collections. I knew there was this incredible cultural richness,” she said. “It still motivates me very much.”
While completing her undergraduate studies, she interned at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New Museum, and ICA Boston. Later, she worked at MoMA as the Andrew Mellon Museum Research Consortium Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Drawings & Prints and worked for the Director of MoMA’s Cisneros Research Institute of Latin American Art, Inés Katzenstein. Before her current work, she was an Associate Curatorial Director at Pace Gallery.
Her global perspective helped take her career to uplifting cultures beyond a single area. “One of my most exciting curatorial experiences I’ve had was actually being a part of the curatorial team for the Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It was incredible to be part of an all-Korean team and to really immerse myself in the culture of that place and to represent it on such an international stage,” she explained. “Up to that point, I was thinking about going into academia, but the opportunities I had there, working with curators and artists, made me realize that I loved working with living artists in particular. Because of that experience, I felt like I needed to return to the museum.”
As a curator and historian, vibrant art found across the iconic cities of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles has long interested her. Despite seeing numerous cities around the world, both in her childhood and education, she has settled within the art scene of Southern California.
Currently, she works as the Assistant Curator at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art. What stood out to her about this institution is the integration of both art and academics. Here, she hand-selects pieces from the museum’s collection and engages with faculty and students. She highlighted the museum’s interdisciplinary approach, integrating art into coursework at a heavily STEM-focused university.
“For example, we have people from the nursing school come and look at a work of art. We’re doing visual analysis and a sort of appreciation of the artwork that is not so much about the art history, but more about interpretation and empathy and connecting with one’s emotions,” she explained. “This will help them in their professions, when they care for patients or when they deal with the family members of somebody who’s really ill, this is part of the care that they give.”
Since its opening, the UC Irvine Langson Museum has remained open and free to the public. The museum’s recent unification with UC Irvine brought two locations together: the Jack and Shanaz Langson Institute and Museum of California Art (Langson IMCA) and the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA). Such an expansion to the institution’s reach is what drew her to this institution, compared to the places of her past.
“It is part of a dynamic and well-resourced university system with a commitment to rigorous research and interdisciplinary thinking that aligns with my own priorities and values as a curator,” Mohrmann said. “It is especially significant to me that the UC system is public and that UCI has so many first-generation college students, as this ensures that the fruits of my labor are shared broadly and can contribute to social mobility.”
Recently, the Trump administration has cut funding and threatened censorship to many artistic and cultural institutions across the country. While not all have been impacted, the approach to social and political conversations must evolve.
However, no matter the external influences, Mohrmann’s time spent curating on three continents demonstrates that art will always remain relevant and powerful.
Exhibitions remain objective, but what makes them distinct for the viewer is that they can see it through a lens unique to them. From the works or artists put on display, Mohrmann says, there is the possibility of impact for anyone.
“As curators, as educators, we can put the art out there, but it takes time for there to be any sort of effect on a broader population,” she explained. “On the individual level, I absolutely believe that art can change a single person’s life. It can even save a life. It’s happened to me.”
When thinking back to the art pieces that have made a significant impact in her own life, the works of UC Irvine alumnus Ruben Ochoa came to mind. His work captures resilience through the Latin American experience. Those pieces highlight crucial parts of her identity as a person tied between two cultures.
“[Ochoa’s work] has given me tremendous strength,” she recalled. “It gave me a sense of pride that has helped me in my life, to share some of this art with my parents so that they can also find comfort and strength and perseverance.”
As a long-time viewer of Ochoa’s work, she was excited to share that she is now working collaboratively with him on an upcoming exhibition, “Breakdown Breakthrough: Art and Infrastructure.” It will feature a handful of works from various artists, including Ochoa, in a two-part exhibition shown at the Langson gallery and a pop-up in front of the Irvine Barclay Theater Plaza. The exhibition uplifts the perspectives of the Chicanx community in Southern California across generations. When describing the concepts for the show, Mohrmann adds how the pieces will uncover Los Angeles’ urban neglect and call for deeper reflection on the impact on communities of color.
Since she was a child, she has seen how art captures the complex layers of humanity. Now that she finds herself at the Langson museum, it continues to drive her work, making each exhibition distinct from one to the next.
When putting together her past summer show, “California Kinship: Painting Homelife in the Golden State before 1940,” she noticed that former exhibitions had centered on landscapes, representations of California’s wilderness or countryside. Still, she wanted to approach the collection from a new perspective.
“I felt like there was maybe an opportunity here to start talking about social issues and about the people who were populating [California],” she said, adding, “To a certain degree, those landscapes are a fantasy, right?”
With a focus on capturing everyday life, Mohrmann admires a portrait from her exhibition.
To curate a show requires the right eye; one that notices the artist’s quality and technique, but also determines a piece for the way it tells a story.
“You want a combination of the two,” said Mohrmann on her curatorial process. “At least for me, a work that can act almost as a piece of evidence for something that happened in the past, but at the same time be very aesthetically compelling and technically virtuosic.”
Each painting in her exhibition showcased relatable scenes of human connection in everyday life. The colors were bright, and the scenes within each frame garnered a quiet elegance from the depiction of surrounding nature and the relationships shown, simply living in an ever-changing state.
A look into the art featured in Mohrmann’s exhibition dedicated to California portraiture.
“We had significant numbers of portraits that could allow us to see what was happening, socially, economically, and politically in California at that moment,” said Mohrmann. “That’s how it started, just leveraging what we had in the collection and seeing what untold stories could be extracted from that. It really was a story about the progressive values and ideals of the state, which were ahead of its time.”
Her shows are not confined to a specific time and place in history. Instead, staying innovative and eager to make new connections in an ever-changing society is crucial for a curator, as they hold “this adaptability, this fluency across different cultures.” She recalls a lesson learned from her past mentors, Inés Katzenstein and Maria Amalia García, at the MoMA. Under a new framework, art seen in past shows becomes repurposed.
“What we’re doing is showing works that have been around for hundreds of years and have been viewed many times and have been talked about many times,” said Mohrmann. “What we bring to our interpretation of the work is our new methodologies and our perspective from the present to make it clear how the work is still speaking to us now, how it’s relevant to us now.”
While an artist’s production continues to evolve, so do the historians showcasing that work. She focuses on exploring new ways to keep these stories relevant for generations. While some may dread the research, Mohrmann finds her role as a historian and curator gives her the best of two worlds.
Mohrmann faces a stand-alone piece featured in her summer show.
“I like to mine history. I like to be in the archives. I like to read a lot of primary and secondary sources. I like generating information and interpretations,” she said. “As a curator, there is this hugely creative process, that is the exhibition, but also, it’s very research-oriented.”
What art strives to convey to the viewers shares a similar foundation. Every framed piece of work in a show has the power to tell a story, and that is exactly what Mohrmann, the assistant curator at Langson Museum, strives to achieve. However, distinguishing what story to tell is not as apparent as one may think. She says, “There’s a bit of showmanship to curating.”
Many exhibitions begin on the same barren foundation for possibility — spanning several rooms, divided by short hallways, the walls painted in neutrals with the dark wooden floor, allowing the art to shine for itself underneath the lights overhead. For most, there is not much to catch your eye, but the curator’s eye sees otherwise. “Art is always a sort of mirror for us,” she describes. “To help us understand who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.”