With This MoMA Artist, the Painting Does the Talking

RICHMOND, Calif. — Before Marlon Mullen begins a painting, he likes to tidy his work space. He’ll pre-mix his paints — Golden acrylics in recycled pots — and lay out his brushes and canvas on his table. Often, he’ll empty the studio’s trash cans. Sometimes he’ll even sweep the yard outside, or rearrange objects on the studio shelves according to their relation to colors he plans to use in his painting. As I learned when I visited him in Richmond, California, one recent rainy morning, this ritual process can take days.

Mullen works at NIAD, an art studio for developmentally disabled adults. The name initially stood for the National Institute for Arts and Disability but was later changed to Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development. NIAD opened in 1982. Mullen, now 61, began attending in 1986, when he was 23. Three days a week, he is picked up by a private bus from the home he shares with three other men, and rides the 15 minutes to Richmond.

It was the wish of NIAD’s founders, psychologist Elias Katz and his wife, artist Florence Ludins-Katz, that the artists working in their studios should sell their work and exhibit it within the mainstream art world; several have been represented by commercial galleries and seen their work enter museum collections.

Few, however, have achieved Mullen’s level of acclaim. In 2019, he exhibited four paintings in the Whitney Biennial. He is represented by Adams and Ollman gallery in Portland, Oregon, and the Bridget Donahue gallery in New York will soon begin representing him on the East Coast. His paintings now sell for up to $28,000. And on Dec. 14, a solo exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art, comprising 22 paintings made since 2015. He is the first person with a developmental disability to be given such an exhibition at MoMA.

Mullen is a tall man with a kindly, concerned face. He is known among his friends and colleagues for his sartorial élan, and on the day of my visit was sporting a tan Adidas tracksuit with a pale pink T-shirt, a black Nike ballcap and Nike high-tops. While many of the artists working in the studio at NIAD were eager to talk and show their work, Mullen kept his distance, busying himself at the back of the room. Except for a handful of words, Mullen is almost entirely nonverbal, and is on the autism spectrum. He communicates mainly with hand gestures and through what Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, described as his “expressive, charismatic” paintings.

The pictures for which Mullen is best known are based on covers of art magazines such as Art in America and Artforum, abstracting image and text into mosaics of solid color. Alongside these, MoMA’s exhibition includes outliers such as paintings featuring only text (“The world of Picasso” states one 2016 work, acquired by the museum, after a book from the Time-Life Library of Art) and another inspired by a photo of a red Mustang in an automotive guide.

“What I get so excited about with Marlon’s work is that it tells us everything we need to know about what he cares about,” said Jasmin Tsou, founder of JTT in New York, and the first commercial gallerist to give him a show, in 2015. (JTT, a launchpad for young talents, closed in 2023.)

Artists at NIAD have at their disposal a rich array of source material such as books and journals, most of them donated. Earlier in his time at NIAD, Mullen favored National Geographic magazines. But these days it’s most often art magazines that catch his eye. When I visited, he had selected an edition of the hardback Horizon magazine, which ceased publication in 1989, its orange cover emblazoned with a medieval illustration of men in boats.

Is it possible, I asked Tsou when we spoke by phone, that Mullen was encouraged — by circumstance, by well-meaning facilitators at NIAD, by those selling his work — to paint the kinds of subjects collectors and curators are already intimately familiar with? One can see how the narcissistic art world might enjoy seeing itself reflected back at itself.

“We get this question a lot,” she said. “And it always makes anybody who knows Marlon laugh. Marlon has a tremendous amount of agency.” She recalled how, after Mullen reproduced the January 2017 issue of Artforum featuring a painting by Kerry James Marshall, she presented him with a book on the artist. Mullen accepted the gift graciously, then, after she’d left, put it away and apparently never picked it up again.

Matthew Higgs, White Columns director and one of Mullen’s earliest champions, had a similar experience when he tried to commission the artist to paint a cover for The Paris Review; Mullen looked at the issues of the journal Higgs sent him and placed them at the back of a drawer. The commission was never completed.

Amy Adams, director of Adams and Ollman, who began exhibiting Mullen’s work in 2016 after she saw it at JTT, said, “Sometimes Marlon prioritizes something when making an image that I would consider a minor detail.” That could be a bar code — a bugbear to graphic designers that Mullen appears to celebrate — or an object’s shadow. “To me, that’s really fascinating about my biases and how I see or understand the world,” she said.

Mullen has lately begun to attend to the sides of his canvases as well as their fronts, copying text from magazines’ spines and thus highlighting his pictures’ status as objects, rather than as flat canvases. When he visited MoMA this past January, with Amanda Eicher, NIAD’s executive director, Mullen looked closely at the shaped canvases of Elizabeth Murray, as well as Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” 1889, which captivated him for a full 40 minutes. When Mullen subsequently reproduced Van Gogh’s masterpiece, he worked from a MoMA catalog and included its title along the side of his canvas.

Mullen finished elementary school when he was around 11, and sometimes practices writing words and numbers at the day program he attends when not at NIAD. Nobody — not his sister, April Johnson, not Eicher nor Tsou nor Adams — knows quite how much Mullen understands from the words he transposes. Sometimes, letters are missing from words, sometimes letters collapse entirely, and, elsewhere, words assume the graphic playfulness of concrete poetry. (“March-April” in one of his paintings becomes, satisfyingly, “machmnmm,” incorporating his initials.)

Tsou said she can’t discard the possibility that Mullen can indeed read, “because sometimes he uses words almost too perfectly.” She cited several paintings from 2016 that reproduced a chapter heading from a book on Van Gogh, titled “The Misfit.” Mullen painted the chapter number — 1 — as an I: “I The Misfit,” reads his painting, poignantly.