SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Casemore Gallery announces INDEX, a group exhibition featuring painting, sculpture, prints, and mixed media works by NIAD Art Center artists Karen May, Marlon Mullen, Maria Radilla, Shawn Sanders, Danny Thach, Jonathan Valdivias, and Arstanda Billy White alongside Theo Baransky, Alex Bradley Cohen, Michael Hall, Chris Johanson, Corita Kent, Sahar Khoury, Christopher Knowles, Michael Mangino, Alicia McCarthy, Ruby Neri, and Evelyn Reyes.
In 1986, Marlon Mullen began practicing at NIAD Art Center, a progressive art studio for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Since 2012, his paintings have primarily employed covers and advertisements from glossy art magazines such as Artforum, ARTnews, or Art in America as source material. Mullen paints with his canvas flat on the table, and the publication he has carefully selected sits neatly atop the work in progress as he transmutes the content. He starts with text before moving onto painting the background and then finally, the imagery, stripped of fine details. While Mullen’s compositions have become increasingly intricate in the past decade, earlier paintings like those featured in this exhibition illustrate a preoccupation with text as motif. Mullen’s style is singular, but on any given day at NIAD, one is likely to encounter a number of artists in the studio who are studying art historical tomes or images of pop culture icons that serve as prompt, inspiration, and accompaniment.
Using Marlon Mullen’s practice as a springboard, INDEX culls artists who share an aptitude for formal experimentation through skewing or collapsing perspective, tinkering with scale, willfully defying the boundary between abstraction and figuration, and skillfully using bold hues. With an aesthetic that is often funky and chunky, a number of these artists sample and remix their sources including canonical art historical works; the covers or advertisements from glossy art magazines; symbols, text, and imagery culled from mass media; and mundane elements of daily life. For others, external referents and relationships are reduced to pure color, gesture, or motif. INDEX is less concerned with deciphering direct citations than it is with looking at how artists mediate and transform artworks, images, and the world around them, forming conversations imbued with affection, reverence, and possibility.
Lucy I. Zimmerman is a curator and oral historian who worked in museums for the past 15 years. Before joining NIAD Art Center as Art Marketing & Partnerships Director in the fall of 2024, she was Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. Zimmerman managed the Artist Residency Award in Visual Arts at the Wex, actively commissioned new interdisciplinary artwork, and curated dozens of exhibitions including Sahar Khoury: Umm; Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols; Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment; Stanya Kahn: No Go Backs; HERE: Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Maya Lin; Alicia McCarthy: No Straight Lines; Cecilia Vicuña: Lo Precario/The Precarious; Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me, among others.
Access is a conceptual and critical touchstone in her curatorial practice, as well as a lens through which she thinks practically about navigating space, relationality, communication, equity, and belonging. Often drawing on disability studies and disability justice, institutional critique, queer theory, phenomenology, decolonial and intersectional frameworks, Zimmerman’s ultimate goal is to always center the voice and vision of the artist.
At NIAD, Zimmerman oversees the exhibition program; partnerships with galleries, museums, and nonprofits; artwork sales; publications; communications; and special projects. She is thrilled to uphold Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz’s belief that creative expression is a human right–one that is empowering and transformational.
