Tina Mion
American artist (born 1960)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Tina Mion (born August 26, 1960)[1] is an American contemporary artist, working in oil paint and pastels.[2] She lives in Winslow, Arizona, where she and her husband own La Posada, a local hotel in which much of her art is on display.[3][4]
Life
Mion was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up going to the museums there.[2] She apprenticed with New Hampshire painter Sidney Willis, and attended art school but dropped out before finishing, instead traveling to Sri Lanka and India.[2][5]
She met her husband, Allan Affeldt, in 1988 on a peace walk organized by Affeldt from Odessa to Kiev in the Soviet Union.[2][5][6] In the late 1990s, they moved from the University of California, Irvine, where her husband was a graduate student, to Winslow, Arizona, in part because Mion found the open spaces of Homolovi State Park to be an inspiration in her work.[4][5] They bought and restored La Posada, a dilapidated 1929 hotel in the La Posada Historic District of Winslow; in 2005 Affeldt became the mayor of Winslow.[3][4][7][8] A museum of Mion's artworks opened within the hotel in April 2011.[9]
Art
Mion's 1996 "Virtual Election" project consists of a set of 52 portraits, of 42 U.S. presidents and several other famous people, together with a web site allowing visitors to vote among them.[2] The series has been shown at several presidential libraries, and she later added another series of portraits of presidential wives.[5][10]
A 1997 painting by Mion from the presidential wife series shows Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis holding a playing card (the king of hearts) cut into two by a bullet. It is now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, as is a 2007 pastel by Mion depicting astronaut Neil Armstrong.[1][11] Several more of her works have been featured in temporary exhibits at the Smithsonian.[1][11][12] A giclée print of the Onassis painting is also in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.[13]
Mion's painting process was described in the short documentary film Tina Mion – Behind the Studio Door (2011, directed by David Herzberg) which was shown in 2012 in the Sedona Film Festival[14] and the Newport Beach Film Festival.[15]
