US artist with autism holds solo exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art

Mullen’s show at the Museum of Modern Art, the first by a developmentally disabled artist, speaks volumes. Photos: NYT

Before Marlon Mullen begins a painting, he likes to tidy his work space. He will 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 colours he plans to use in his painting.

As I learned when I visited him in Richmond, California, the United States 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.

Art gives individuals with autism a unique way to express themselves.

Few, however, have achieved Mullen's level of acclaim. In 2019, he exhibited four paintings in the Whitney Biennial in New York. 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 US$28,000 (RM126,234). And on Dec 14, a solo exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, 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 non-verbal, 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.

Artistic independence

Through art, Mullen can communicate his feelings and creativity.

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 colour. Alongside these, MoMA's exhibition includes outliers such as paintings featuring only text 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 favoured 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.

Amy Adams, director of Adams and Ollman, who began exhibiting Mullen's work in 2016 after she saw it at JTT, said, "Sometimes Marlon prioritises 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.

Understood through art

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 with NIAD executive director Amanda Eicher last year, Mullen looked closely at the shaped canvases of Elizabeth Murray, as well as Van Gogh's The Starry Night 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.

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.

People with disabilities are so often excluded from the dominant cultural discourse, Temkin observed, that Mullen's work is both about that discourse and a profoundly original contribution to it. His exhibition at MoMA is in the museum's double-height Projects Space, a gallery typically given to artists who, Temkin said, "have not already had a great deal of museum exposure."

The curator emphasised the historical significance of Mullen's exhibition. Modernism's rejection of the rigorous standards of academic art meant that artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries often looked to the art of untrained people or those with disabilities. "That dialogue between so-called insider artists and so-called outsider artists for more than a century has been such a fruitful one, at the very heart of the modern art project."

What seems undeniable, though, is that through his painting, Mullen assumes a distinctive voice, one that Johnson, his sister, said would otherwise be unavailable to him. As she put it, "I think he feels understood through his painting, and that gives him a way to talk to the world." – ©2024 The New York Times