A self-trained artist who often takes art and art magazines as his subject will get a major museum spotlight this coming winter. In its Projects gallery, which is free to enter, New York’s Museum of Modern Art is staging a show of California painter Marlon Mullen. His first solo exhibition at a major museum, it will, appropriately enough, serve as the premiere for a brand-new work inspired by the cover of the museum’s own publication Van Gogh: The Starry Night, devoted to one of its best-known works.
Featuring 25 paintings from the last decade, the show will include two examples from the museum’s holdings. One untitled 2017 work is based on an Artforum cover showing a work by Kerry James Marshall—which, itself, shows a Black artist holding up a gargantuan palette.
Born in 1963 in Richmond, California, Mullen has since 1986 been based at his hometown’s NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development), which hosts and supports artists with developmental disabilities. It’s part of a network of studios in the Bay Area working with this population, including Creative Growth and Creativity Explored.
After a decade principally working in printmaking, Mullen turned to painting. The Center started receiving steady donations of art magazines in the late 2000s, and Mullen has been working with it extensively ever since.
“He’s committed to the work of painting, thinking about what it is and what it can be, and to an exploration of abstraction that’s deep and resonant,” said Amanda Eicher, NIAD’s executive director, in a phone conversation. “Like many artists, he’s translating pop culture into form and texture and layers in a way that’s extraordinarily sophisticated.”
Marlon Mullen at work in the NIAD studio. Courtesy of the artist and NIAD.
Examples in the show focus on covers and advertisements from top publications like Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, and Sculpture that feature works by artists as varied as Andy Warhol, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. He doesn’t precisely reproduce the source material, but instead uses it as inspiration for graphic riffs in bold shapes and vivid colors. Other works are based on a series of Time-Life books with monochrome covers; the museum’s 2016 The World of Picasso features just the titular words on a blank background.
The show is organized by no less than the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, Ann Temkin, with support from curatorial assistant Alexandra Morrison.
“He’s really identifying his work as an artist with the art world as it’s presented through these publications, so it’s an intense relationship that he’s creating,” said Temkin in a phone call.
“There’s so much artistry,” she added. “If someone were to just say that the technique was copying the covers or advertisements, that would be such a misrepresentation. They’re a starting point in a way, but he makes his own choices.”
Mullen’s work is a notable entry in a long tradition of art that references existing art. Just to name a few examples: Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) sexualized Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (c. 1504); Cindy Sherman’s 1990 Untitled (#224) restaged Caravaggio’s Young Sick Bacchus (1593–94); appropriation artists like Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine recreated works by artists from Andy Warhol to Walker Evans; and Louise Lawler creates works showing her and other artists’ work in situ in museums, storage spaces, and collectors’ homes.
Marlon Mullen, Starry Night (2024), displayed with the publication it is based on. Courtesy the artist and NIAD.
Mullen’s work has appeared on major art-world stages before. The 2019 Biennial exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art included an untitled 2018 work depicting an Art in America cover. He’s also had solo exhibitions at in-the-know galleries like New York’s JTT; Adams and Ollman of Portland, Oregon (which represents him); and Brussels’s Sorry, We’re Closed, as well as New York nonprofit White Columns, and many other venues.
Museums have also collected his work, including not only MoMA and the Whitney but also the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and Oregon’s Portland Art Museum.
MoMA itself has a long tradition of showing folk artists, outsiders, and self-trained practitioners. Curator Holger Cahill mounted the 1932 show (just eight years after the museum’s founding) “American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900.” Five years later, William Edmondson would become the first African American artist to have a solo show there; in 2021–22, the museum organized a show of Joseph E. Yoakum. The museum owns examples by some of the best-known artists in this arena, like James Castle, Henry Darger, Thornton Dial, Martín Ramírez, and Bill Traylor.
“One of the things that attracted me to thinking of proposing this as a venue for Mullen’s first solo museum show was the really deep connection to MoMA’s history, going back all the way to the beginning, of looking at the work of artists who—the wording has changed umpteen times—were not in a professional art world market and ecosystem, and instead forged different paths to recognition and visibility,” said Temkin. “MoMA, starting with [founding director] Alfred Barr and Holger Cahill and Dorothy Miller and so many others, from the early days right up to the present, has seen this this strand of creativity as a very vital part of Modern art history.”
“Projects: Marlon Mullen” will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 W 53rd St, New York, December 14, 2024 to April 20, 2025.