Lee Mullican was born in 1919 in Chickasha, Oklahoma and died in Los Angeles in 1998. Upon his graduation from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1942, Mullican was drafted into the army, serving four years as a topographical draughtsman before moving to San Francisco in 1946. After winning a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959, he spent a year painting in Rome before returning to Los Angeles where he joined the UCLA Art Department in 1961, keeping his position for nearly 30 years. He divided the later part of his life between his homes in Los Angeles and Taos, traveling internationally and co-organizing exhibitions at UCLA. A retrospective spanning fifty years of the artist’s work was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2005. Mullican is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
