For Immediate Release

May 25, 2018

ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART ANNOUNCES DIGITIZATION OF MATERIAL DONATED BY ARTIST MATT MULLICAN

First significant compilation from a “Pictures Generation” artist in the Archives’ collection spans Mullican’s iconoclastic, multi-disciplinary practice

WHAT

The Archives of American Art announced the digitization of 77 notebooks created by the multi-faceted artist Matt Mullican (b. 1951) that the artist gifted to the Archives from 2014 to 2017. Available on-line at the Archives’ website, the notebooks’ depth of content include hundreds of drawings and sketches, conceptual frameworks, notes, lists, calendars, travel logistics, and diary entries. It is the first major collection from a Pictures Generation artist to be donated to the Archives.

Dating from 1968 to 2017, the Mullican collection also features large sequences of gallery and exhibition files, as well as project and commission files that provide detailed documentation of his professional career, particularly from the 1980s through the 2000s.

Mullican is best known for combining performance, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and video as a means of investigating the subjective through the intersection of communal signage and personal meaning-making. A member of the Pictures Generation that includes Jack Goldstein, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, and Richard Prince, among others, Mullican decodes images and signage through diagrams, patterns, and written words. The artist has also been known to examine his own subconscious through hypnotism in his quest to understand patterns and how to subvert them. The material shows the development of Mullican’s complex cosmology and multifaceted practice from his art school days to his current position as an acclaimed international artist.

Mullican said, “I wanted to have my notebooks online at the Archives of American Art because I hate locks. I didn’t want to put my notebooks in a room where they’d be locked up. Now they have the possibility of life. They are open and can live and breathe. Anyone can see them and be influenced by them. They are out in the open in the world.”

WHERE        

Archives of American Art

750 9th Street, NW, Victor Building, Suite 2200 

Washington, DC 20001

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections

SUPPORT

Funding for the digitization of this collection was provided by the

Widgeon Point Charitable Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Matt Mullican

Based in New York City and Berlin, Matt Mullican (b. 1951) is an acclaimed multi-media and conceptual artist whose work represents a process of understanding, explaining, and structuring the world around him. Born in Santa Monica, California, he is the son of abstract surrealist painters Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado Mullican. Educated at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the early 1970s, and mentored by John Baldessari, Mullican moved to New York City after earning his BFA and became associated with the “Pictures Generation” artists that included friends Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, and James Welling. His multi-disciplinary practice encompasses drawing, painting, collage, video, installation, and performance—sometimes under hypnosis as his alter ego, “That Person.” Through these media, Mullican explores systems of knowledge, the construction of reality, as well as meaning, language, and signs. Throughout his career, Mullican has participated in international solo and group exhibitions and has undertaken dozens of public and corporate commissions. His work is currently the subject of a retrospective, The Feeling of Things, at Pirelli HangarBicocca, in Milan, Italy.

Archives of American Art

Founded in 1954, the Archives of American Art fosters advanced research through the accumulation and dissemination of primary sources, unequaled in historical depth and breadth, that document more than 200 years of the nation’s artists and art communities. The Archives provides access to these materials through its exhibitions and publications, including the Archives of American Art Journal, the longest-running scholarly journal in the field of American art. An international leader in the digitizing of archival collections, the Archives also makes more than 2.7 million digital images freely available online. The oral history collection includes more than 2,300 audio interviews, the largest accumulation of in-depth, first-person accounts of the American art world. https://www.aaa.si.edu

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