Mel Odom (b. 1950, Richmond, VA) is a New York-based artist whose career spans drawing, painting, and collectible design. Raised in Ahoskie, North Carolina, he received his BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and later his MFA at Leeds Polytechnic Institute in the UK, before relocating to New York City in 1975. Odom gained prominence through his singular, meticulous drawings commissioned by major publications including Playboy, TIME, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, Blueboy, and Interview, earning multiple honors from the Society of Illustrators. Part of the unique generation of gay men who experienced New York both before and after the AIDS crisis, Odom’s practice was shaped by an acute awareness of life and death, giving his work a quality that is at once celebratory and memorial. In the 1990s, he achieved widespread recognition as the creator of the Gene Marshall fashion doll, inspired by his late boyfriend and the glamour of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Referencing everything from Art Deco to the pre-Raphaelites, Aubrey Beardsley to Christian Schad, Odom has cultivated an aesthetic that embraces fragility, romance, loss and reinvention as anchors of emotional truth and the queer experience.

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Nothing Vast Without a Curse, Sans titre, Paris, FR (2026); DREAMS FOR SALE, Sea View, Los Angeles, CA (2026); Blind Tongue, David Lewis, New York, NY (2023); and Gorgeous, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, New York, NY (2019). Recent group exhibitions include L’âge du trait, Sans Titre, Paris, FR (2025), Cupid’s Bow, Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA (2023), Works on Paper: 100 Years, Amanita, New York, NY (2023), Neo Rising, Polansky Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic (2022). Mel Odom is co-represented by Sea View, Los Angeles and Sans Titre, Paris.