Alison Mutha Magazine Article May 2026

That duality never left her. After dropping out of the Rhode Island School of Design (she was three credits shy of a degree in textile design), she drifted into the world of culinary pop-ups. But these weren’t just dinners. They were installations . For one event in a derelict Silver Lake laundromat, she served a seven-course meal inside the dryers, each course paired with a specific spin cycle. Critics called it “pretentious.” Mutha called it “the only way to get the sourdough to rise at that altitude.” But success, even niche success, has a hangover. By 2022, Mutha was exhausted. The pop-ups had garnered a cult following (Beyoncé’s stylist once flew a plate of her koji-cured egg yolk to Paris), but Mutha had stopped sleeping. “I was making art for the algorithm. For the ‘in-the-know’ listicle. I realized I hadn’t drawn a single thing for myself in three years.”

“We’ve confused ‘output’ with ‘value,’” she says. “I have a rule: I don’t create anything before 11 a.m. I don’t check my phone until I’ve finished one stupid, useless thing. Draw a snail. Memorize a single line of a poem. Count the number of tiles on your bathroom floor. That’s your real work. The rest is just commerce.”

That dinner party, as it happens, is the subject of her upcoming memoir, The Third Setting (out next spring from Tiny Reparations Books). Part recipe collection, part philosophical treatise on creative burnout, and part love letter to her late grandmother—a Tamil mathematician who taught her how to fold samosas and fractals with equal precision—the book is as unclassifiable as Mutha herself. Born in suburban Maryland to an Indian-American cardiologist and a Jewish folk musician from the Bronx, Mutha grew up in a house where a discussion about the Bohr model of the atom could segue into a Dixieland jazz session. “My father wanted me to be a surgeon,” she laughs. “My mother wanted me to be Joan Baez. They compromised by buying me a secondhand Moog synthesizer and a scalpel. I was the only 12-year-old at the science fair who could dissect a frog and score the procedure in D minor.” alison mutha magazine article

And in an age of AI-generated scripts, ghostwritten op-eds, and algorithmic anxiety, maybe that is the most radical act left.

Her next project? A graphic novel with no words, set entirely in a single elevator. A fragrance line based on the smell of a library after a rainstorm. And, improbably, a documentary about competitive whistling. That duality never left her

The result is her first solo gallery show, “A Kindness of Crows,” opening this November at Regen Projects in Hollywood. The paintings are massive, brooding landscapes where the horizon is always a little crooked. Crows appear in every frame—sometimes as observers, sometimes as the landscape itself. “A group of crows is called a ‘murder,’” she notes. “But I think that’s wrong. When I was out there, they kept me company. They reminded me that solitude isn’t loneliness. It’s just a different frequency.” When asked for advice for other creatives who feel the pressure to perform, Mutha leans forward. Her hands are stained with ink and turmeric. She smells like cedar and ozone.

Alison Mutha’s memoir, “The Third Setting,” is available for preorder now. Her show “A Kindness of Crows” runs Nov. 15–Jan. 10 at Regen Projects, Los Angeles. They were installations

There’s a particular kind of quiet that lives in the canyons of Topanga, California. It’s the sound of chaparral brushing against denim, the low hum of a vintage amplifier warming up, and the soft scratch of a charcoal stick on recycled paper. For , 34, that quiet isn’t an absence of noise. It’s a presence. It’s a choice.