That dinner party, as it happens, is the subject of her upcoming memoir, The Third Setting (out next spring from Tiny Reparations Books). Part recipe collection, part philosophical treatise on creative burnout, and part love letter to her late grandmother—a Tamil mathematician who taught her how to fold samosas and fractals with equal precision—the book is as unclassifiable as Mutha herself. Born in suburban Maryland to an Indian-American cardiologist and a Jewish folk musician from the Bronx, Mutha grew up in a house where a discussion about the Bohr model of the atom could segue into a Dixieland jazz session. “My father wanted me to be a surgeon,” she laughs. “My mother wanted me to be Joan Baez. They compromised by buying me a secondhand Moog synthesizer and a scalpel. I was the only 12-year-old at the science fair who could dissect a frog and score the procedure in D minor.”
The result is her first solo gallery show, “A Kindness of Crows,” opening this November at Regen Projects in Hollywood. The paintings are massive, brooding landscapes where the horizon is always a little crooked. Crows appear in every frame—sometimes as observers, sometimes as the landscape itself. “A group of crows is called a ‘murder,’” she notes. “But I think that’s wrong. When I was out there, they kept me company. They reminded me that solitude isn’t loneliness. It’s just a different frequency.” When asked for advice for other creatives who feel the pressure to perform, Mutha leans forward. Her hands are stained with ink and turmeric. She smells like cedar and ozone. alison mutha magazine article
Photography: Jordan Reed Styling: Marcus Chen That dinner party, as it happens, is the
She bought a crumbling Airstream, drove it to the Mojave Desert, and did something radical: nothing. For six months, she watched shadows move across the sand. She learned to whittle. She wrote letters to her dead grandmother by candlelight. And when she finally picked up a brush again, the work was different. Darker. Slower. More honest. “My father wanted me to be a surgeon,” she laughs
Her next project? A graphic novel with no words, set entirely in a single elevator. A fragrance line based on the smell of a library after a rainstorm. And, improbably, a documentary about competitive whistling.
And in an age of AI-generated scripts, ghostwritten op-eds, and algorithmic anxiety, maybe that is the most radical act left.