I first encountered Mark Stockton’s work during a group show at Bridgette Mayer Gallery. My attention was drawn to a meticulous graphite on paper illustration of Elon Musk, featuring various rockets and Musk-related symbols. The work was understated but densely packed. A few weeks later I met with Mark as part of a series of interviews with Philadelphia art world leaders discussing the current political climate. I spoke with Mark in his role as the Executive Director of Drexel’s Pearlstein Gallery, but as we dug in, I realized I was also sitting with the person who created that Musk drawing.
Mark is an interesting character. His work is a fanatically analytical deconstruction of American mythology and the images that support those myths. Once deconstructed, Mark reconstructs them for us, leaving a trail of clues revealing the deeper channels of our cultural psyche.
Mark has exhibited widely over the years and has cut a path through the arts ecosystem. This edited interview is a small taste of a very complex stew. You’ll want to read to the end for the discussion of George Washington’s teeth. That is surely the cherry on top.
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. I asked him first about curating in a university gallery.
Mark: You have to think long in advance. There’s a show coming up that deals with the environment… trying to provide solutions. We’re excited about the proposal because we’ll be working with (various) departments at Drexel. Drexel doesn’t have a fine arts degree per se, but there are a lot of fine artists teaching foundational courses and applied arts like graphic design, digital media, interior design.
Before this we had a comics show with over 60 Philly-based comic artists (Philly Comics Now). It’s a really energetic scene. My agenda (as a curator) is to act locally. With the Philly Comic Show I worked with Tom Marquet and Gina Dawson of Partners and Son, a South Philly comic shop. It’s an alternative comic store and a well respected gallery. They run podcasts and presentations. I helped build the show but I really looked to them to curate the selection of artists. I often consider myself less of a curator and more of an organizer or collaborator. I want to rely on experts. I wanted someone that has the day-in-day-out pulse of the community. So I guess I’m sort of a curator of curators.
Since being in Philly, I have worked with the artist-run space Vox Populi…about 10 years as an artist member and another six on the Board (author’s note: Mark is also a former Board Chair at Vox). I’m interested in artist-centered organizations. With Pearlstein, Dino (Orlando) Pelliccia had been organizing this space for the last 10 to 15 years and now I’m sliding into that role. I’m not sure how long I’ll do it…I don’t really aspire to be a curator. Partly because It eats at my art making brain, and then there’s the endless time that goes to admin and budget and grant writing, etc.
Pete: It diverts your energy.
Mark: Yes, because I am teaching as well, and that’s a third job. And so those three things as well as having an engaging family, and working with Vox … all of these endeavors take up a lot of time and time is an artist’s most valued resource.
Next we dug into Mark’s history. I wanted a sense of his formative experiences.
Mark: I grew up in Gresham, outside of Portland, OR. I had a pretty regular upbringing…played sports. But I always did art. From an early age I was good at drawing. I drew a lot of comics. I’m still interested in comics and storytelling. I received a scholarship to Oregon State so I could attend very cheaply. I had some really great professors. Harrison Branch, an African American photographer; Clint Brown, Yuji Hiratsuka and Shelly Jordan. Both Harrison and Shelly had been from New York. They set up a field trip to New York my Junior year of undergrad and it just blew my mind. Having over 500 galleries in that compressed location. I immediately felt I should be there.
I took a gap year before I applied to grad schools. My parents had just moved to Washington D.C., and I was working at the National Gallery of Art in the bookstore. Henry Sayre came through. His son was going to Syracuse University, and he told me I should look into it. After some research, I decided to go there because it was a three-year program and you could teach your own classes. That’s where I met my wife, Cindy Stockton-Moore.
While in Syracuse, I founded a gallery space with other grad students, called Spark. That lasted for over 20 years. Some of my formative (experiences) happened there. In 2001, we moved to New York right before 9/11. It (happened during) my first day at Parsons where I started a job in the photo department as a technician. 9/11 really colored our perspective.
We were in Brooklyn for about eight years until 2008 when (I saw) a job opening at Drexel. I had been teaching at Mercer County Community College for five years after Parsons, commuting on average three hours a day. We were already looking at moving to Philly to ease the commute. I ended up getting that job and now I ride my bike to work. I love Philly. It’s home now. When we moved to Philly we joked…why is everybody talking about having kids and buying houses? Now we have two kids and a house.
Oddly, I didn’t gain a ton of traction showing my work in Brooklyn. I’d be in group shows mainly, yet simultaneously, I had some success out west and had a handful of solo shows and art fairs through Acuna-Hansen, a Los Angeles gallery in Chinatown (note: their website is now defunct). Looking back, I didn’t really love the effect the commercial art world had on me. It always confounded me. Everybody in New York talked about what are you selling? How much are you selling it for? What fairs are you in? I think if you get that attention, there’s something very invigorating about it, but selling work to wealthy collectors would always cloud my generative process in the studio.
When I moved to Philly (I wanted to know)…what’s happening here? No one’s talking about selling work. It was apparent there was not a great collector base. There was a lot of talk about the artist-run spaces, and so I looked into this ecosystem, and I eventually became a member of Vox Populi. I really appreciated this sort of creative agency. I had a bunch of solo-exhibits where I had full creative control, and I also could curate and organize shows. We did a few bigger crossover shows with the wider network of other artist-run spaces, including my wife Cindy who was working with Grizzly Grizzly at the time. One was called Citywide, interconnecting a large group of Philadelphia’s artist-run spaces. Another one was called Alternative Currencies in conjunction with Kaytie Johnson who was curating over at Moore College. For that one we invited artist-run collectives from across North America including Mexico, LA and other cities. And as all of this went on I became interested in all of that while still making my work. I’ve also had a pretty good relationship with the West Collection, which has helped me (side-step) having a commercial gallery relationship.
We then started to focus on his artwork. This led to a discussion of his thought processes and how he connects to contemporary trends in media and technology.
Mark: Last year, knowing that I was going to be tasked with a lot of director duties as well as continuing to teach, I structured a year long studio project where I would complete a portrait every single day. Often my work deals with contemporary icons and portraiture in mass media but as recreated through my hand… drawn or painted. First, I would draw a portrait one day and then I would paint it the next day. Sometimes I would draw multiple portraits in a row if I was traveling and then come back and paint in the studio. Over the course of the year, I’ve completed 366 portraits of 183 people. I eventually want to show it as a single body of work. It (the selection of portraits) was based on the feed on my phone. I wanted to create a portrait hall of who was most dominant in my particular algorithmic feed. There are quite a lot of people that I’m not particularly fond of in the mix. But I liked engaging in the grind of a daily practice believing that it might reveal something over the course of time as a mirror (of the times).
Regarding my relationships to media, I think it’s insane that we’ve got computers in our pockets now. I try to resist the pull of the media or the feed. I abstain from social media, I’ve never been on Facebook or Instagram. But I have a Google phone and because I document all of my life with my phone I feel like Google owns my digital presence … whatever that might be. It’s not that anybody thinks about that much anymore because it seems like AI is regurgitating all of this, but I think it’s becoming a concern. I think the visual culture is going to change a lot in the next decade with AI altering the landscape of what’s possible. And I think the handmade will also become more resonant as a result.
The discussion then went to Mark’s deep investigation of charged social issues.
Mark: I wanted to do a piece that deals with the undercurrents of white supremacy within (American culture), which I feel is very politically topical now. I had made a drawing about Elon Musk and rocket size. It was a very busy show (at Bridgette Mayer), but that piece stood out because it was non-colorful in a very colorful array. It was meant to be humorous in sort of a diagrammatic research way. Rocket size (is a reference to) penis size and those allusions were in comparison to the Washington Monument.
There’s a piece that sparked my interest and inspired (some) of my work called the Moon Museum. They snuck a ceramic tile on one of the lunar landers. They wanted to be the first to put artwork on the moon. The tile had drawings by six individuals. Two of them were Warhol and Oldenburg. Warhol drew a little sketch of a penis. I mean it really made me laugh. Rockets and monuments in general are not that dissimilar. I compared the artworks on the Moon Museum tile to the six different Musk logos… Starlink, Neuralink, Tesla, Hyerloop, X, Space X. And there was some numerology that was interesting… like 69. I guess the best time for us to try to make a shot to Mars is 2034 and a half, which was half of 69.
I’m also going to have a piece in the Vault in May (author’s note: the Vault is a small, separate space in Bridgette Mayer Gallery that they often use to feature the work of a specific artist). The piece is called “George Lincoln Rockwell.” George Lincoln Rockwell are the first names of George Washington, and the last names of Abraham Lincoln and Norman Rockwell. There are three different pieces about each of those iconic American identities. There’s a two foot by two foot piece about George Washington, a four foot by four foot piece with Lincoln, and a six foot by six foot piece with Norman Rockwell. When Rockwell worked at the (Saturday Evening) Post he did over 300 covers, I think he only ever depicted three people of color. He was explicitly asked not to (include) people of color unless in positions of servitude. That shocked me. There’s a really good article in Vox about Rockwell’s political reckoning after his stint at the Post. Later his work gets way more racially inclusive.
He was quite a studio workhorse as well as a very gifted artisan illustrator. I’ve always been interested in Rockwell because I feel that even more than someone like Warhol, he’s the most popular purveyor of this false sense of American nostalgia. And I think making work In an illustrative fashion (can be) more topical to political subjects.
The other undercurrent with George Lincoln Rockwell is that it’s also the same name of probably the most notorious American Nazi from the mid-20th century. There’s a scary photo by Richard Avedon of him and his acolytes on a blank white background. The two portraits used in the Lincoln and Washington drawings are (the ones) used for the dollar bill and penny. One, a crop of Lincoln, is by Matthew Brady’s studio. The Gilbert Stuart portrait (of Washington) I believe was done in one live session. So in a way, I am investigating the dominance of the most known portraits as both visual and literal currency. I feel like Rockwell’s Post work has that same mass-media eminence. And we are so indebted to our capitalist structure that it’s hard to break out of it.
The larger Rockwell piece is from a photograph that he took of him holding a young girl running in a position. He’s on his knees and holding her leg and her arm, and there’s another person holding her hand. The girl looks like she’s running and smiling, but she’s really being held while he’s smoking his pipe. Around that, I’ve mixed in a whole selection of imagery from the research photographs of the various models he used for his Ruby Bridges painting, and some of his other racial reckoning work that is arranged alongside (some earlier) racially insensitive images.
He would often do his own photos and use props like guns. Essentially, I’m observing and connecting America’s (and Rockwell’s) often difficult and duplicitous relationships with a variety of subjects: with native communities, with guns, with race. It’s not overtly about one specific thing, but I think things can be complicated and be about two things simultaneously, It’s like having those undercurrents with the Musk piece…space flight and humans moving beyond Celestial Earth versus jokes about penis size.
For better or worse, with American culture, you are expected to do your own “research” … whether it’s tabloid culture, really good journalism, or (other media sources) that can likely lead to conspiracy theories. In the digital age, and with the internet in particular, you can go down so many rabbit holes. Those narratives, and how we construct our own narratives, really fascinate me. You can construct barriers within your own echo chamber. And then that can be your truth.
Mark then turned to a riveting deconstruction of George Washington’s false teeth.
Mark: The Washington piece is a black-and-white graphite drawing of three visual and physical references to George Washington. It includes drawings of Gilbert Stuart’s painting from life, a life mask made by (Jean-Antoine) Houdon and Washington’s false teeth (on display at Mount Vernon). The general narrative is that Washington had wooden teeth. The truth is that he had other humans’ teeth in his mouth. I placed it (the drawing of the false teeth) alongside the lifemask that has a closed creepy mouth, almost an indifferent slightly smirking expression. I’d go down to Alexandria because my parents were living there, and ever since I saw those teeth, they disturbed me because I was thinking “Oh, these are real teeth.” And there are records of him buying slave’s teeth to give to a certain dentist. On the Mount Vernon website it even says that these were (not verified) but could potentially be teeth from his slaves that were in his mouth. Just knowing that while he was speaking the original words of our democracy and forming the new country with words that were passing through the extracted teeth of slaves. That’s a rich one right there.
I often take my drawing students to the Academy of Natural Sciences and I recently found out there’s a book in their rare collection library of hair samples where some person oddly collected famous people’s hair. Coincidentally, they have a lock of Washington’s hair. I’m just fascinated that someone could look to do science using DNA and genetically reverse the research to determine (Washington’s genetic descendants). You could probably do the same thing with the teeth he wore in his mouth.
To take a deeper dive into Mark’s deconstruction of our culture and myths you can go to his website and visit the upcoming show at Bridgette Mayer (April 1st through May 24, opening reception April 11th, 5:00-7:30pm). You can see the results of his curatorial at the Pearlstein Gallery website.
Read more articles on Artblog by Pete Sparber.
Read more from Mark Stockton.
