Marlon Mullen
2026 Eureka Fellow
Since 1986, Marlon Mullen has been practicing at NIAD Art Center, a progressive art studio for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Richmond, CA. For the past 20 years, Mullen has used magazines like Art in America and Artforum as his source material—usually placing the publication directly on the canvas, positioned flat across studio tables, laying down text first in a generous layer of paint, then pushing and pulling elements of the original image into and out of focus.
Mullen’s work has been exhibited widely, including at White Columns; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Oakland Museum of California; the 2019 Whitney Biennial; and, most recently, Mullen was the first artist with known intellectual and developmental disabilities to have a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work is in the collections of MoMA, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney, and High Museum of Art, among others. He received the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2019 and was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2025.
Currently, Mullen persists in viewing magazines and art books not only as prompts to create, but as invitations to engage with art history and today’s art world on his own painterly terms. His style is always evolving, his compositions increasingly complex, even as he continues to treat canvases as dimensional objects that mirror and refract the publications he paints.
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