Martin Mull’s painting practice is getting a museum-scale reassessment in Santa Barbara.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Art will present “Martin Mull: The Joys of Indoor/Outdoor Living” next June, with the exhibition on view through October. Organized by Steve Martin and Ann Philbin, the show will gather more than 50 drawings and paintings and will be the first museum exhibition devoted to Mull since the Las Vegas Art Museum mounted one in 2006.
Mull, who died in 2024, is widely remembered for his television and film work, including “Fernwood 2 Night,” “Clue,” “Roseanne,” and “Arrested Development.” But his art career ran in parallel for decades. He earned a BFA and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1965 and 1967, respectively, and continued to make and exhibit oil paintings until his death.
Much of the work in Santa Barbara will come from Mull’s estate, alongside loans from private collectors such as Jennifer Tilly, Daniel Greenspun, Robin Greenspun, and Steve Martin. According to SBMA chief curator James Glisson, many of the works were shown in commercial galleries years ago and have remained largely out of public view since then. That makes the exhibition less a retrospective in the conventional sense than a recovery of a body of work that has been visible only in fragments.
Glisson said the paintings resist easy curatorial categories, though several groupings will recur, including a hoped-for reunion of Mull’s “Seven Deadly Sins” series and a section devoted to his pencil drawings, which often served as studies for the paintings. In press materials, Martin described the late work as having coalesced in the final 20 years of Mull’s life into “tight, narrative paintings of a peculiar nature.” He will also contribute a text to the exhibition catalog.
The project is the second curatorial collaboration between Martin and Philbin, who previously organized a Lawren Harris exhibition at the Hammer Museum in 2015. In this case, the starting point was intimate: Philbin noticed a Mull painting hanging in Martin’s dining room and began researching his work from there. The result is a show that places Mull’s visual art at the center of his legacy, where it has long belonged.
