Editor’s note: This story includes frank discussions about suicide.
Friends refused to visit Tina Mion when she was growing up in small-town New Jersey, as it was not a well-kept secret that her family’s house previously had served as a mortuary.
“It was not emptied out, even though the place had been closed for a long time,” says the Winslow, Arizona, painter and sculptor. “So there was equipment there including a blood-draining table, curtains that still had blood on them, jars filled with all kinds of weird, creepy things. I was left alone there a lot.”
Mion became familiar, and comfortable, with the concept of death at an early age, and the ending of life has been a theme in her work ever since. Her familiarity with the subject matter helped her create the most striking piece in Departures, her exhibition running through September 7 at Kouri-Corrao Gallery.
That diptych, My Brother’s Suicide, shows a smiling figure hanging by its neck from a tree in one panel, gun in hand. In the second panel, both the figure and the gun are falling, both having succeeded in their missions. The oil-on-linen painting is simple and large, measuring 68 by 38 inches.
Mion’s brother Russell shot and killed himself in 2018, while her mother attempted to kill herself multiple times, Mion says, pointing out that suicide can run in families. She will attend a reception from 5-7 p.m. Friday, August 2, at Kouri-Corrao, and she knows she might encounter attendees emotional about their own experiences with suicide.
“I’ve been painting about death and suicide and difficult subjects all my life,” Mion says. “And I think what’s interesting is, when I’m giving talks and people bring up personal experiences, it gets other people talking. My whole aim is that people talk about this.”
In 2004, she created A New Year’s Party in Purgatory for Suicides, featuring a who’s-who of famous suicide victims and people she has known; Liberace, who died, but not of suicide; and herself, who’s very much alive. The painting features 77 faces, among them those of poet Sylvia Plath, writer Ernest Hemingway, scientist George Eastman, and musicians Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holiday. On her website, Mion identifies a man in the painting wearing a cowboy hat as fellow Winslow artist Gordon Pond, who learned he would gradually go blind and opted to end his life.
Suicide follows no timeline, Mion says. Her brother used a gun that she believes he’d had access to for many years.
“It can be a sudden deadly depression or mental health crisis, or it can be long-term drug and alcohol addiction,” she says. “That is a slow suicide, which I’ve seen in my family. There is also what I call rational suicide, which is your right to end your life if you’re in the midst of a very painful illness. That also I saw with a family member. So I think if you take those three types together, it touches everybody’s lives.”
The smiling figure in My Brother’s Suicide is a piñata, a device Mion uses in many pieces.
“Piñata is from the Italian word for fragile pot, and I see humans as fragile pots,” she says. “We’re born empty, but then we’re filled with good experiences, bad experiences, and we’re worn by time.”
There’s a reason the figure depicting Mion’s brother and the gun he’d been holding are in the act of falling in the second panel, rather than lying on the ground. Mion is fascinated by the blink-and-you-might-miss-them moments that can separate strikingly different realities.
An example is Burning Brushes, which Mion created in 2005. It shows her sitting on a bed, facing the viewer, as a cake decorated with burning paintbrushes instead of candles balances next to her. Through a window behind Mion, one sees an elephant perched in a tiny boat in a body of water; the boat clearly is no match for the heft of the animal, which therefore is about to take a thunderous plunge. Mion’s expression suggests she has no idea that moment is about to occur.
An experience last year was a reminder of how important it can be for people to meet artists, not just view their art.
“My whole career as a painter, I’ve always been interested in that line between now and what comes after that split second,” she says. “But the thing about the moth paintings and the piñata drawings, and even the Jackie Kennedy sculpture where the bullet is flying midair, the viewer has to end the story. The moths are on fire and they’re turning into smoke and ashes, but they’re still flying, which is beautiful, and that’s a sense of hopefulness.”
Mion has created images of both moths and the piñata figures broken or on fire. In Stop-Action Reaction — Jacqueline Kennedy, King of Hearts, a bullet passes in front of the former first lady’s mouth, tearing in half a king of hearts card in which the face resembles former President Kennedy’s.
“It’s that split second — that split second when the gun went off, that split second when you have a mental health crisis, that split second when that butterfly gets too close to that flame,” she says. “All my work, pretty much my whole life, has been about that one second. And I don’t tell people the end of the story. They can make the end of their story themselves.”
The show wasn’t set to be designed around My Brother’s Suicide, gallery director Takeo Royer says, but that image quickly emerged as its centerpiece.
Tina Mion, Spectacular Death Spoon, Self Portrait with Elephant (2024, bronze, oil glaze, and gold leaf)
TOM ALEXANDER PHOTOGRAPHY
“And, you know, the intention is never to be uncomfortable, but to confront our collective realities or individual narratives through art,” he says of the two images. “So I think looking at these pieces, you are able to bring your own experience.”
While My Brother’s Suicide might be the most shaking element of Departures, a series of spoons featuring famous figures is its most distinctive. Mion’s spoon sculptures stand as tall as a person. One dedicated to Marie Antoinette is balanced atop a pink cake — pink appears often in Departures — in tribute to “Let them eat cake,” a phrase commonly and probably incorrectly attributed to her, about the plight of the poor in France in the 18th century. A model guillotine sits atop the sculpture — it’s not functional, so fear not for your fingers — and Antoinette’s head rests at the bottom, upside down.
“The spoons all [feature] women,” Mion says. “There’s Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide, and there’s a watercolor with a little oven with pink knobs.”
Plath’s suicide at age 30 came after several failed attempts. Her body was found in her home’s kitchen, her body slumped against the oven and her head inside it.
She was separated at the time from her husband, American poet Ted Hughes.
“Hughes married a second woman who was also a female poet,” Mion says. “Female poets, by the way, are among the most likely people, besides veterans, to commit suicide. And she also killed herself by putting her head in the oven. They had two children, and one of them, their son, committed suicide.”
Mion and her husband, Allan Affeldt, live in Winslow, where they restored La Posada Hotel on Route 66. If their names sound familiar, it might be because they gave the same treatment to Castañeda Hotel in Las Vegas in the late 2010s. By then, Mion had been using suicide as subject matter in her work for about 15 years.
“When I started painting about suicide, I had people come up to me and say, ‘I never told anybody this, but I’ve got a son ...’ or, ‘This has happened to me.’ It gave us the ability to talk about it,” she says. “By the way, there’s a new mental health and suicide crisis number. It’s 988. In everything I do, I put that number out.”
