'Martin Mull: The Joys of Indoor/Outdoor Living' in Santa Barbara will be curated by comedian-actor Steve Martin and former Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin.
Martin Mull was best known to audiences for playing comedic characters like Col. Mustard in “Clue” and Gene Parmesan in “Arrested Development,” but a new exhibit opening next year at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art seeks to elevate the role Mull was most proud to inhabit: a respected painter.
, comes to SBMA next June and runs through October. It will be the first major museum exhibition of Mull’s artwork in 20 years. The paintings featured include scenes of unassuming houses visited by otherworldly guests, dead-eyed office workers, gravity-defying displays and lambs being led to the slaughter. They play with perspective, color, space and time to illuminate postwar American tensions, be they racial, political or existential.
“Martin Mull’s work as an artist will certainly be his primary legacy,” Martin said in a statement. “After a full-time career in painting, in the last 20 years of his life with his technical gifts fully developed, Martin’s art coalesced into tight, narrative paintings of a peculiar nature. Combining surreal elements with family idioms, he formed his own worried portrayal of American life.
”The exhibit, which will take over the museum’s 6,000 square feet of main galleries, will feature more than 50 paintings and drawings by Mull, most of which come from the artist’s estate and the private collections of Mull’s entertainment industry colleagues, including Steve Martin, Jennifer Tilly, and Ted and Nicole Sarandos . In blow to L.A. art scene, Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin to retire in 2024 Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin will step down from the post in fall 2024, wrapping up a quarter-century at the helm of an institution that she drastically transformed.
, told The Times via email that the idea behind the Mull show came after she saw one of his paintings in Martin’s dining room.
“Steve talked about how Mull’s painting practice was his deepest passion, despite the fact that his fame was as an actor and comedian. It prompted me to do a little research, and I became very intrigued by his body of work. I wrote to Steve, ‘Martin Mull. There’s something there.
’ That’s how the project began,” she said. Along with Martin and Philbin, the upcoming exhibition is led by SBMA Chief Curator James Glisson and Amada Cruz, the museum’s director and CEO. In a news release, a museum spokesperson said Mull’s work “upsets any storybook picture of perfection” and resists nostalgia while acknowledging its allure.
“It’s so deeply strange — dark and funny, hopeful and menacing all at once,” Philbin said. “The paintings are about the smoldering tensions that underlie the American dream, so I think it’s a particularly apt moment to bring them back into the public eye. ”Call Him an Artist Who Happens to Act : In his talk at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, TV veteran Martin Mull says painting, his first love, remains his true vocation.
Martin Mull, best known as an actor and comedian, admits he’s not always taken as seriously as he’d like when he tells people he is also a painter.received his master of fine arts degree in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967. Though he went on to craft a career in the public eye as a musician, comedian and actor,Eloise Rollins-Fife is an intern with the Entertainment and Arts Desk at the Los Angeles Times.
She is a graduate student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and previously received her bachelor’s degree in cinema and media studies from the University of Southern California. A born-and-raised L.A. local, she has worked across the entertainment, fashion and service industries. Her writing has been featured in Los Angeles Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Mercury News and other local and digital publications. Entertainment & Arts
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