The Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA) is organizing the exhibition Martin Mull: The Joys of Indoor/Outdoor Living, curated by Steve Martin and Ann Philbin, set for June 27-Oct. 17, 2027.
Mull (1943-2024), who was 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 exhibit of Mull’s artwork in 20 years.
“We are excited to be presenting this exhibition of the work of Martin Mull at SBMA,” said Amada Cruz, Eichholz Foundation director and CEO of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.
“For many, the exhibition will be a surprising introduction to this iconic actor’s painting practice,” Eichholz said. “The show is conceived by Ann Philbin, director emerita of the Hammer Museum, and Mull’s long-time friend and enthusiast Steve Martin.
“Philbin and Martin will co-curate in close collaboration with our own chief curator James Glisson. The exhibition will be the centerpiece of the museum’s summer program in 2027, and continues the SBMA legacy as a place of discovery and the unexpected.”
The presentation will feature Mull’s cool, surreal and often dark takes on postwar American life, according to SBMA.
“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,” SBMA said.
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, Mull’s paintings undercut the period’s consumerism and homogeneity, when economic growth fueled a baby boom and better standards of living, SBMA explained.
They depict an underbelly of tension and darkness behind the prosperity of postwar “white culture” in America.
“Martin Mull’s work as an artist will certainly be his primary legacy,” said Martin. “After a full-time career in painting, in the last 20 years of his life with his technical gifts fully developed, Mull’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.”
Time right for reevaluation of Mull’s career as an artist
Martin, a serious art collector and writer about art, knew Mull for more than 50 years, and avidly followed his parallel career in the visual arts.
Co-curator Philbin, whose record of bringing attention to emerging and under-known artists is well-known, brings her expertise in works on paper, ensuring the artist’s exquisite drawings will receive overdue attention, SBMA said.
The exhibition reunites Martin and Philbin in a curatorial endeavor, as Martin co-curated the critically acclaimed show “The Idea of North: The Paintings of Lawren Harris” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2015.
“With the characteristic light touch we know from his comedy, Martin Mull explores the dystopic landscape of postwar suburban America,” said Philbin. “His surreal and haunting images have a simmering — sometimes even sinister — tension and feel oddly resonant in this moment.”
In Mull’s paintings, something is amiss, storm clouds linger over paradise, SBMA said. This uncanniness takes on different forms. There are intimations of Old Testament vengeance and prophecy breaking through into 20th-century America.
In “Pride,” a man stands in front of a clapboard house in the countryside and holds two kid goats. The effect is menacing, even sacrificial, an impression confirmed by the painting being part of Mull’s series “The Seven Deadly Sins.”
“Envy,” another work from the series, shows two women in an office, perhaps from the 1940s, stiffly posing for the camera. This generic photograph from an unknown location of now-anonymous women becomes a kernel for a psychodrama. Who envies whom, and what happens next?
Still other paintings bring out the latent desires and fears that are suppressed in daily life.
In “Winter/Summer and Spring/Fall,” nude women cavort in plain view against the background of an unassuming neighborhood — a disturbing fantasy or, equally probable, a nightmare of social embarrassment.
“Mull’s art is much too clear-eyed for nostalgia, but it presumes we know about the nostalgia for the postwar era,” organizers said. “Mull gives us a partial version of the racial and economic uniformity offered as the good life in the 1950s and 1960s beffore the paroxysms of the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam protests, and the counterculture.
“Mull upsets any storybook picture of perfection; in his works, something is always off or, less subtly, blowing up in the background. This is where his relevance lies for the deeply unsettled 2020s.
“The dry tone of Mull’s paintings, the curiosity and matter-of-factness they display about the stresses and complexity of the world and the difficulty of neatly summing them up, make them excellent guides for navigating our current times with discerning eyes, free of dogmatism and cliché,” the museum said.
Presented in the main galleries of SBMA, the exhibition will comprise more than 50 paintings and drawings, the majority of which are on loan from the artist’s estate and the collections of Mull’s friends and colleagues in the entertainment industry.
Mull’s artworks are held in the collections of museums across the U.S., including LACMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, and UC Irvine Orange County Museum of Art.
An exhibition catalogue, with texts by Martin, Dave Hickey, James Glisson, and other contributors to be confirmed, will be designed by Purtill Family Business and published in June 2027 by DelMonico Books. Images of more work here.
About the contributors
Mull was born in Chicago and lived with his family in North Ridgeville, Ohio, and, later,
New Canaan, Connecticut. He broke into show business in the 1970s as a musical comedian.
He gained notoriety in the 1976 nighttime absurdist comedy soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” followed by the spin-off talk show parodies “Fernwood 2 Night” and “America 2 Night.”
As a visual artist, Mull showed in group and solo exhibits, and a book of his work “Paintings, Drawings and Words” was published in 1995.
Later in life, he became a prolific writer. In April 2026 a collection of his short stories “Life
Sentences,” was released by Hard Cider Press. Written during his final years these tales are about men similar to Mull pushed up against the intractable realities of aging and illness.
Mull lived most of his life in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
Martin is one of the most well-known talents in entertainment. His work as a comedian and actor has earned him an Academy Award, five Grammy Awards, an Emmy, the Mark Twain Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors.
Martin began his career on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” (1967-69). In the mid-1970s he shone as a stand-up on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”
Martin’s films include “The Jerk” (1979), “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” “Roxanne” (both 1987), “Parenthood,” (1989), “L.A. Story” and “Father of the Bride” (both 1991), and “Bowfinger” (1999).
Martin is also an accomplished Grammy Award-winning, bluegrass banjoist and composer.
His work as an author includes the novel “An Object of Beauty,” the play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile,” a collection of comic pieces, “Pure Drivel,’ a bestselling novella; ”Shopgirl,” and his memoir “Born Standing Up.”
Martin’s 2018 Netflix special with Martin Short titled “An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life” received four Emmy nominations in 2018.
Martin and Short also executive produce and star together in Hulu’s Emmy Award-winning series “Only Murders in the Building,” along with Selena Gomez.
Philbin is director merita of the Hammer Museum UCLA, Los Angeles, where she served from 1999-2026. In that time, she transformed the museum into one of the leading contemporary art institutions in the U.S., celebrated for its ambitious, artist-centered program and commitment to innovative and socially engaged work.
Under Philbin’s leadership, the museum gained an international reputation for its exhibitions, public programs, and support of emerging and underrepresented artists.
From 1990-99, Philbin held the post of director and chief curator at the Drawing Center, in New York City.
James Glisson joined The Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2020 as curator of contemporary art, and in 2024 he was named chief curator.