Tina Mion (born August 26, 1960)[1] is an American contemporary artist, working in oil paint and pastels.[2]She lives inWinslow, Arizona, where she and her husband own La Posada, a local hotel in which much of her art is on display.[3][4]
Mion was born inWashington, 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 apeace walk organized by Affeldt fromOdessa toKiev in theSoviet Union.[2][5][6] In the late 1990s, they moved from theUniversity of California, Irvine, where her husband was a graduate student, toWinslow, Arizona, in part because Mion found the open spaces ofHomolovi State Park to be an inspiration in her work.[4][5] They bought and restored La Posada, a dilapidated 1929 hotel in theLa 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]
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 showsJacqueline Kennedy Onassis holding a playing card (the king of hearts) cut into two by a bullet. It is now in the permanent collection of theSmithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, as is a 2007 pastel by Mion depicting astronautNeil Armstrong.[1][11] Several more of her works have been featured in temporary exhibits at the Smithsonian.[1][11][12] Agiclée print of the Onassis painting is also in the collection of theNelson-Atkins Museum of Art.[13]
Mion's painting process was described in the short documentary filmTina Mion – Behind the Studio Door (2011, directed by David Herzberg) which was shown in 2012 in theSedona Film Festival[14] and theNewport Beach Film Festival.[15]
Instead of depicting Armstrong's face, Mion's version is an "object portrait" that tells the story of his moon adventure with a mix of symbols – a slice of Swiss cheese for the moon, Q-tips and marshmallows for the moon lander, and a toothpick with an American flag.
The portraiture of Tina Mion is a little slipperier, ranging from the hyper-realistic ("The Last Harvey Girl," whose subject, an elderly former waitress, offers a cup of tea so real I was tempted to sip from it) to the fanciful (a portrait of the late Jacques Cousteau consists of seashells where the French oceanographer's eyes, nose and mouth should be). ... Mion's engagement with her subjects, in other words, is both idiosyncratic and universal.
