Artist uses ‘bad year’ to inspire self-portraits

ANNA MARIE TENDLER TELLS HARPER’S BAZAAR ART CONVEYS ‘RECLAMATION OF IDENTITY’ AFTER DIVORCE FROM COMEDIAN JOHN MULANEY

Anna Marie Tendler has had quite the year, according to a new piece in Harper’s Bazaar.

The artist was previously best known for her marriage to comedian John Mulaney as well as her Victorian lampshade designs. After the couple separated last year, Tendler began to gain her own kind of fame through her raw Instagram self-portraits and quirky TikToks.

She and Mulaney bought a home in Connecticut in early 2021, but Tendler has only ever lived in it on her own, according to the Harper’s Bazaar piece. She also grew up in Bethel, according to a 2015 interview with Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls.

“People hear Connecticut and they think Greenwich,” she told Harper’s Bazaar, alluding to the fact that people assume she grew up wealthy. The piece went on to say that she clarified “her parents lived on one income and she attended public school—and she doesn’t take any of what she gained during her years with Mulaney for granted.”

Tendler’s self portrait artwork collection titled “Rooms in the First House” was recently featured in The Other Art Fair, where they sold for prices as high as mid-six figures, according to Harper’s Bazaar. The photograph backdrops are from rooms in Tendler’s Connecticut home, which she told Harper’s Bazaar she painstakingly decorated to look like “a haunted dollhouse.”

“I was able to create the space that, even as a child, I always wanted to live in,” she told Harper’s Bazaar.

“Rooms in the First House” was inspired by her divorce and experiences in 2021, which Tendler refers to as the “really bad year.” The title

is meant to symbolize the first astrological house, the house of self “these photographic works chronicle the often non-linear experiences of loss, anger, and powerlessness, as well as a reclamation of

identity,” according to Tendler’s website.

The collection, which originally was posted to Instagram, includes artsy portraits of Tendler posed across a staircase in a “Titanic”

t-shirt, lighting a cigarette with an antique candelabra and wearing a flower-adorned set of antlers while sitting in a graveyard.

Her artwork can be viewed on her Instagram @annamtendler.

Rachel Murray/Getty Images Artist Anna Marie Tendler photographed during The Other Art Fair Los Angeles presented by Saatchi Art in partnership with BOMBAY SAPPHIRE at Barker Hangar on Sept. 23, 2021 in Santa Monica, Calif.