Projects: Marlon Mullen

There is no mistaking the work of Marlon Mullen. His vibrant paintings, with their lush surfaces and bold color, expand the long-standing tradition of making art about art.

For nearly 40 years, Mullen has been based at the NIAD Art Center, a progressive art studio for artists with developmental disabilities in his native Richmond, California. Donated issues of art publications, such as Art in America and Artforum, serve as his primary subject matter. Projects: Marlon Mullen presents a selection of the artist’s paintings from the past decade.

Upon selecting a glossy cover or an interior page as a point of departure, Mullen paints using acrylic on canvas, flat on a table. He maintains visual ties to his source material, while also radically transforming it. The resulting compositions reimagine the relationships among their parts. Barcodes and other details may zoom into prominence. Letters, numbers, punctuation, and the spacing between them may disappear or repeat. Imagery and graphics all become pure form to be reordered and reshaped. As this exhibition demonstrates, Mullen views magazines and art books not only as a prompt to create, but also as an invitation to engage with today’s art world on his own painterly terms.

Organized by Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture, with Alexandra Morrison, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture. Emma Jaromin and Theresa Rodewald of the Department of Learning and Engagement and Cindy Chong, Jamaal Hooker, and Lana Hum of the Department of Exhibition Design and Production have collaborated closely in realizing this exhibition.

Mullen began his artistic career working at NIAD, a progressive art studio in Richmond, California, in 1986. While Mullen has had no formal art school training, he started out drawing and printmaking at NIAD, where he is surrounded by fellow artists every day. Essential to his practice is the studio’s library, where Mullen often finds inspiration for his paintings, as well as his relationships with studio facilitators, some of whom he has worked alongside for decades. “Mullen’s work is a contemporary exemplar of a centuries-old tradition of artists making art about art, an avenue of invention richly evident in MoMA’s collection,” Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of Painting and Sculpture, said. “Taking the covers of art books and magazines as his subject matter, Mullen transforms them into dazzling paintings that bring him and us into the thick of today’s art world.”