Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Performance, installation, drawing, printmaking, sound
Website: tommarioni.com
Tom Marioni was born in 1937 in Cincinnati, Ohio, into an Italian American family. His father was a physician and Sunday painter; his mother sang opera and played harp and piano. Marioni studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy from 1955 to 1959, and after graduating he moved to San Francisco, where he has lived and worked ever since. He served in the U.S. Army in Germany from 1960 to 1963 before returning to the Bay Area and immersing himself in its emerging conceptual art scene.
From 1968 to 1971 Marioni served as curator at the Richmond Art Center in the East Bay, where he organized a series of groundbreaking exhibitions — including The Return of Abstract Expressionism (1969) and Invisible Painting and Sculpture (1969) — that helped define the transition from object-based art to conceptual and process-driven practice. In 1970 he founded the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco, widely recognized as one of the first alternative art spaces in the United States; it operated until 1984. Marioni received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981 and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts during the 1970s. He was awarded a SECA Award in 1999. He married Kathan Brown, founder of Crown Point Press, in 1983, and has had a long collaborative relationship with the press, which has published his prints since 1974. He is the author of Beer, Art and Philosophy: A Memoir (2003) and Writings on Art 1969–1999.
Marioni works across performance, installation, social practice, drawing, printmaking, and sound, often collapsing distinctions between these modes. His practice is rooted in the idea that social interaction itself can be a sculptural medium: his long-running salon The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art (begun 1970) frames convivial gathering as the artwork, with the resulting debris — empty bottles, chairs, tables — left as evidence. He was influenced by Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture and by jazz, describing art as improvisation and communication rather than finished object.
Drawing occupies a central place in Marioni’s work: his freehand circles, long lines, and mark-making actions are performed live as demonstrations of the body’s limits and gestures. His prints, produced at Crown Point Press across five decades, translate these concerns into etching, aquatint, drypoint, and woodcut. Sound appears as both material and subject — his earliest action, One Second Sculpture (1969), compressed sculpture, music, performance, and drawing into a single second. Throughout his career Marioni has returned to themes of duration, gravity, the social body, and what he calls “life art”: the proposition that art and lived experience are inseparable.
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