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Art & Design|With This MoMA Artist, the Painting Does the Talking
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/arts/design/marlon-mullen-moma.html
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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, Calif., 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, the psychologist Elias Katz and his wife, the 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, Ore., 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 developmentally disabled person to be given such an exhibition at MoMA.
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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 ball cap 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.
