Martin Mull: The Joys of Indoor/Outdoor Living

The Santa Barbara Museum of Art is organizing the exhibition Martin Mull: The Joys of Indoor/Outdoor Living, curated by Steve Martin and Ann Philbin, set to run next year from June 27 to October 17, 2027. Martin Mull (1943–2024), well known as an actor, comedian, and musician, studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1967 and throughout his long entertainment career never stopped making and exhibiting his art. This will be the first major museum exhibition of Mull’s artwork in 20 years.

This presentation will feature Mull’s cool, surreal, and often dark takes on postwar American life. Extraordinarily skilled with a brush, Mull combined scenes drawn from his childhood in the Midwest and sourced from old photographs to create physically impossible situations. Women float above trains, streets transform into rivers with splashing swimmers, or tightrope walkers scale tiny bedrooms. Frequently set in the newly built suburbs of 1950s and 1960s, these paintings undercut the period’s consumerism and homogeneity, when economic growth fueled a baby boom and better standards of living.