with Lucy Commoner, December 2025
LC: You are a Brooklyn-based artist whose portfolio spans a huge range of functional and fine art pieces. As well as your textile-based works shown in this exhibition, you have created furniture, clocks, watches, playing cards, chess sets, jigsaw puzzles, combs, holiday ornaments, and designed and produced artist windows for stores—all in your distinctive visual language. How did it evolve for you to combine functional art and fine art in your studio?
KM: I was not really exposed to the fine arts growing up in central Florida, but at a young age I was exposed to crafting and scrapbooking. I was drawn to things that my peers were not: old things, abandoned buildings, beach combing, and National Geographic magazines. I was attending an arts high school when my teacher, Rocky Bridges, assigned us to gather scrap metal from a junkyard to make assemblages. That lit a spark for me. The tactility and the predetermined patterns and colors the material provided really got me going. Bridges had gone to The Cooper Union and encouraged me to eventually apply. Once I was there, we made collages out of color-aid and fall leaves in color theory class. My interest in using and exploring everyday objects and material continued to grow - I wanted to understand how things were made and why they were made: specifically, how the stylistic or formal elements of objects influenced their function. After school I started working the windows at department stores and then in fabrication shops, which suddenly gave me a lifetime supply of off-cuts and scraps to make whatever I wanted after-hours. At one point my goal was to have made every functional object in my house. I started making things, thinking if I studied enough materials, I would be capable of making anything and then I could start making “art” again. It kept me connected to the world. But at some point, I realized I have been making art all along.
LC: Your work is evocative of the output of Memphis Milano, an Italian design group from the 1980s founded by architect and designer Ettore Sottsass. Your playful and rich use of color and form and your combination of hand and production work seem to relate to the design objects of the Memphis Group. Have they or other artists and designers had a particular influence on you?
KM: I am really drawn to Memphis Milano because of their ability to mix high and low culture. My other influences are kind of all over the place. I’m drawn to Mark Dion’s work because of his ability to collect and categorize objects as a way to examine institutional systems.
Mike Nelson and Alex Da Corte for their commitment to immersive world-building. I love how Sara Cwynar’s research and process are visible in her work, and the grids of catalogued images that result. Noguchi’s seamless bridging of design and art worlds, Rauschenberg’s reappearing symbols and motifs, the magical process of Charles and Ray Eames. And I cannot forget Alan Shields, whose playfulness and dyed fabric supports have highly influenced my tarp series.
LC: In the painted tarps in this exhibition there is a stark contrast between the fluid background of bleached out splotches with some softly dyed areas and the incredibly precise painting of geometric and representational shapes that appear to be floating above the background, as if in the cosmos. Can you describe your creation process in these dynamic works?
KM: These tarps are factory-dyed, so I first reverse-dye them with bleach to set the stage: forming frames, fields, grids, maps and environments, then applying acrylic medium and paint using vinyl stenciling drawn out on a computer that metaphorically and visually float on the surface of the tarps with loose gestures embedded in the fabric. Sometimes the overlayed pictures are things I’ve collected in my day to day, sometimes they’re an image I can’t get out of my head.
LC: Painting on commercial factory-dyed canvas tarps is a unique approach that you began about two years ago. Before that, you were producing similar works painted on board. Although the masterly painted geometric shapes that you used on wood are in a similar vocabulary to your tarp paintings, the effect is very different on a rigid piece of wood as opposed to a flexible textile. What led to your recent shift to painting on canvas tarps?
KM: I attended my first artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 2023, and I really wanted to challenge myself and my understanding of materials. The rigid MDF boards I was painting on previously were all off-cuts that my CNC guy at my old job salvaged and cut-down for me to use at a set size I gave myself. I wanted to push myself to work a little looser and bigger — so I found these tarps from a place called Chicago Tarps and Canvas, they were perfect: vibrant, mobile, and unconventional.
LC: Your art and functional design work are united through a lexicon of complex, optically powerful, and imaginative geometric and realistic shapes. Is there symbolic meaning to these shapes and the practice of repeating them throughout your work? Although fine art and functional design are often traditionally thought of as separate categories, do you think that your use of a repeated vocabulary of shapes has allowed you to so successfully combine art and design in your studio?
KM: Repeating the shapes and symbols across my paintings and design objects loosens and opens up their meanings for viewers. I want people to bring their own associations, memories, and feelings to the images instead of imposing my reading of them. My hope is that my work feels accessible and familiar — our world is made up of symbols and languages, a circle may make you feel one way and me another - I just want you to feel something.
Kim Mullis is a queer artist who seeks connection to their surroundings through design and formal exploration. Kim grew up in a conservative community in Central Florida before moving to New York City in 2004 to attend the Cooper Union's School of Art. They received a BFA in 2008, subsequently working as a fabricator of visual and window displays, which furthered their interest in worldbuilding through sculpture. In 2010, Kim formed a company called Wilderness Bodies out of their interdisciplinary studio practice to combine their interest in art and object-making. Kim has been included in multiple group shows in NYC, including END UP for The Salvage Lab at Castle Fitzjohns Gallery, Paradise at The Hand Space, and KIM/KIM with Pat Kim at Fredericks & Mae. In 2022 and 2024, Kim designed window displays for Hermès’ artist windows series. Since 2022, Kim has been an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center (2023), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2024), and Anderson Ranch Art Center (2025).
Kim Mullis, A Sky Without Stars (2023)
Acrylic paint, factory-dyed canvas tarpaulin, grommets, 80 in x 60 in