The Explosion, 2025
Jill Mulleady
Courtesy of the artist
Join artist Jill Mulleady for a conversation marking the opening of Jill Mulleady: The Passenger—the artist’s first solo show at a major museum.
Mulleady’s paintings often depict scenes that are enigmatic and dangerous, showing figures at risk or under threat—from appetite, predation, or compulsion. Her imagery draws actively on painting lineages—allegory and the Baroque, Symbolist unease, the grotesque—recasting genres and canonical images for the present. In contrast to the purity and rationality of 20th-century Modernism, Mulleady prioritizes a tradition in which chaos, instinct, and history drive art making.
The artist will be joined in conversation by David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University; and Giampaolo Bianconi, Dittmer Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Together, they will reflect on the works in the exhibition and the ideas animating Mulleady’s practice. The conversation will take up questions of painting’s role in an era of remediated artistic practices, considering how images travel, transform, and accumulate meaning across contexts.
This program is made possible by the Carol Given Winston Fund for Docent and Patron Education.
About the Speakers
Jill Mulleady lives and works between Los Angeles and Paris. She works primarily in painting and often intervenes in the spaces where she exhibits, staging the paintings with readymades, sculptures, and architectural installations and exploring themes of memory, transformation, and the power of history. In her work, references to historical painting are put into communication with images taken from both popular culture and personal life, creating an anachronic feeling of merged and frictional temporalities. Her practice shifts between close observations of everyday reality and highly elaborated imaginary worlds. These paintings can be seen as allegories for the contemporary experience of the image as an interface—not just a picture but a means of mobilizing attention, bodies, and affects within an increasingly virtualized social space.
David Joselit began his career as a curator at the ICA in Boston from 1983 to 1989. He has taught at the University of California, Irvine; Yale University, where he was chair of the History of Art Department from 2006 to 2009; and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor and Chair of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard. Joselit is the author of Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (MIT, 1998), American Art Since 1945 (Thames and Hudson, 2003), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (MIT, 2007), and After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012). He co-organized the exhibition Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, which opened at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich in 2015. He is an editor of the journal OCTOBER and writes regularly on contemporary art and culture. His book Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT Press 2020) won the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award. His most recent books are Art’s Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023) and a co-authored volume, Art/Work: Plastics (Princeton University Press, 2025).
Photo by Mary Ellen Carroll
Giampaolo Bianconi serves as the Dittmer Associate Curator in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an expert on international intermedia artistic production since the 1960s. His recent exhibitions include John Knight: A work in situ (2024), Ellsworth Kelly: Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance (2024), and Iman Issa: A Game, or So You May Think (2025). Since joining the museum, Bianconi has realized projects with artists including Marwa Arsanios, Charles Atlas, Lorraine O’Grady, Sondra Perry, and Nora Turato. In 2026 he will open exhibitions with Edgar Calel and Jill Mulleady. His writing appears regularly in catalogs and periodicals.
If you have any questions about programming, please reach out to [email protected].
Closed captioning will be available for this program. For questions related to accessibility accommodations, please email [email protected].
