Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Nathaniel Mary Quinn is an American artist.

Born and raised in Chicago, Quinn began drawing at an early age, and went on to receive an MFA from New York University in 2002 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana in 2023.

Quinn’s practice operates within a world of visual metaphor, in which identifiable forms and features are mobilized to reveal aspects of character. Memories and found images unite to form composite portraits that are at once neo-Dada and adamantly realist, evoking the intimacy and intensity of a face-to-face encounter.

His first solo show was at London’s Pace Gallery in 2014, and his most recent exhibition was at the Chicago National Public Housing Museum, with a show called A Love Letter to my Mother. Quinn’s work is now held in major institutional collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, amongst others.

In 2026, Quinn created the art for the cover of the Rolling Stones album Foreign Tongues.

In this episode of Fashion Neurosis, Bella Freud and Nathaniel Mary Quinn discuss his drawings of gang members in the Chicago Projects, how Cubism informed his portraits, and making the Rolling Stones album cover.

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