Margaret Mullin

Margaret Mullin was a Surrealist artist who combined her interests in painting and fashion design to explore memory, identity, and the subconscious.

Mullin was born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1910. She showed a creative interest from an early age, and studied art at Cooper Union during the late 1920s. She then worked as a designer at a shoe company for several years.

In 1935, Margaret Mullin married Joseph Meert, a young painter studying at the Art Students League of New York. The same year, Meert moved to Kansas City to work as Thomas Hart Benton's assistant, and Mullin joined him a year later in 1936. While in Kansas City she exhibited paintings in the Midwestern Artists' Exhibitions and the Kansas City Art Institute Sweepstakes Exhibitions. Her work was represented in Thomas Hart and Rita Benton's Midwestern Artists' Gallery.

In 1941, Meert and Mullin returned to New York. Between 1941 and 1966, Mullin taught costume history at the Traphagen School of Fashion. In 1946, Mullin and a group of other painters including Meert formed a group dedicated to abstract art called Spiral (not to be confused with the Spiral group of African-American artists from the 1960s). Between 1947-1948, they mounted four consecutive exhibitions of abstract art at Galerie Neuf, Forty-Fourth Street Gallery, and the New School for Social Research.

She maintained close friendships within the New York circle of abstract painters during the 1940s and 1950s, including Charles Bunnell, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Mullin created a scrapbook that was purchased by Lisa Unger Baskin and donated to the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University.

In the late 1960s, Mullin and Meert bought a house in Lanesville, New York, near the Catskills mountains. There Mullin's painting and design work flourished. She mounted several solo exhibitions of fashion-inspired chess sets accompanied by egg tempera paintings that were heavily reported by newspapers. During the 1970s, Meert and Mullin turned their living room into a gallery space, welcoming the public to view rotating art exhibitions.

Margaret Mullin died in 1980. Over the course of her career, she exhibited her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Vanguard Gallery, the Denver Art Museum, and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Today, Mullin's work belongs to prestigious collections that preserve her legacy as a pioneering female avant-garde artist.