Location: Richmond, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5777
Marlon Mullen was born in 1963 in Richmond, California, where he continues to live. He has maintained a studio practice at NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development) in Richmond since 1986 — nearly forty years. He is autistic and primarily nonverbal. He is represented by Adams and Ollman in Portland and Bridget Donahue in New York, and a forthcoming solo exhibition is scheduled at Bridget Donahue in 2026. In 2024–25 he became the first artist with a developmental disability to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Portland Art Museum, the High Museum of Art Atlanta, the RISD Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Mullen makes abstract acrylic paintings on canvas, working with the canvas flat on a table. His primary source material is the graphic design of art magazines — donated issues of Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, Sculpture, and others available at NIAD’s library — whose covers and interior pages he selects as points of departure. As he works, he maintains visual ties to his source material while radically transforming it: barcodes zoom into prominence; letters, numbers, and spacing disappear or repeat; imagery and graphic elements become pure form to be reordered and reshaped. He has described his paintings as “an invitation to look at art differently.” MoMA curator Ann Temkin, who organized his solo exhibition, described his work as deeply connecting to MoMA’s long history of looking at artists who “forged different paths to recognition and visibility.” His paintings have been described as kaleidoscopic, topographical, and rigorously formalist — works whose surface complexity rewards the same close looking they were made through.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.