TINA MION

BIO

Tina Mion was born in Washington, D.C. She spent part of her childhood in an abandoned New Jersey Mortuary. Mion studied briefly with New Hampshire painter Sidney Willis before attending (and dropping out of) Paier College of Art in Hamden, CT. 

Tina has travelled extensively from India to Kenya and set up studios from Sri Lanka to Maine. Her first solo show was in 1988 at Veerhoff Gallery in Washington, D.C. That same year she walked across the Ukraine (then part of the USSR) on the International Peace Walk. The following year she helped organize a joint Soviet and American Art Exhibition in Washington, D.C.

In the 1990’s Tina worked on her stone lithography at the Taller Grafica in Havana, Cuba and at Ed Ruscha’s Hamilton Press in Los Angeles. “Virtual Election” - her interactive exhibition of portraits of all the past United States Presidents - opened at Sherry Frumkin Gallery in Santa Monica, CA in 1996, and subsequently traveled to many museums across the country. She followed up with psychological portraits of all the First Ladies. The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery bought her painting of Jacqueline Kennedy, which was also the subject of a feature story about Tina on National Public Radio. In 1997 Tina and her husband bought and restored the historic La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona.

Mion has exhibited three times at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. including in 2007-2008 where she had her own room in the “Framing Memory” show of contemporary portraiture. She has shown in museums around the country and given talks about her work from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Phoenix Art Museum to the University of Chicago. Her work is in many permanent collections including the Nelson- Atkins Museum, Kansas City MO; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and the Albrecht- Kemper Museum, Saint Joseph, MO. Tina Mion lives and works in Winslow and Sedona, Arizona, and soon in her new studio in Las Vegas, NM in the historic Castaneda Hotel that she and her husband recently restored.