About the Artist

Mark Brennan lives in New York City and Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Mass. Stylistically he owes a debt to traditional East Asian painting in his elongated watercolors. His small pictures encased in boxes have affinities with an array of distinctly American artists; one can draw references to William Trost Richards, Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett, to William Harnett and John Peto, Georgia O’Keeffe, Joseph Cornell and Vija Celmins. Like the early Hudson River School and many 20th Century abstract artists, he unapologetically experiments with altruistic and transcendent functions for art, both in his work and in his curatorial enterprises.

In the 1980s he participated in the florid East Village art scene while working for Andy Warhol in the Interview circulation department. Shortly before Warhol’s death, he suddenly abandoned both relationships to travel North America, living in the back of a station wagon. Upon his return to New York, he began teaching public school in District 9 (the poorest congressional district in the country) in the Bronx. A weekend activity, painting, gradually expanded into an avocation.

Recent projects include a solo show of his Space in a Box paintings at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture and Islamic Art/Christian Space (curator) at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, both in Manhattan, attempting to build bridges between two seemingly irreconcilable parties. The latter exhibit was the first ever show of Islamic artwork in an active Christian place of worship. He is a member of Openings Artists Collective in New York. In 2025 he participated in Best of the South Coast Artists, juried by Curator of Contemporary Art at the MFA Boston Carmen Hermo, at the New Bedford Art Museum, and he exhibited his FullFathomFive series in an indoor/outdoor dual exhibit on the Herring River Overlook Trail and at Farm Project Space, a collaboration between Farm Projects and the Wellfleet Conservation Trust.