1990 Master of Fine Arts, Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; 1983 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Cooper Union School of Art, New York, NY
Portia Munson (born 1961) is an American visual artist who works in sculpture, installation, painting, and digital photography, focusing on themes related to the environment and feminism. Her work includes large-scale agglomerations of mass-produced plastic found objects arranged by color, as well as small oil paintings of individual domestic found objects, and digital photographs of flowers, weeds, and dead animals found near her home in upstate New York.[1]
Munson received a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art in 1983 and earned an MFA from Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University in 1990. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine in 1987.[2]
Career
Munson first achieved notoriety with her work “Pink Project: Table” in the "Bad Girls" show at the New Museum, New York, in 1994, consisting of thousands of pink plastic found objects spread out on a table. A similar sculpture consisting of accumulations of pink objects encased in glass vitrines appeared in Munson's 1994 solo show at Yoshii Gallery in New York. Critic Amanda Boetzkes writes: "A key aspect of Munson’s practice is the reorganization of these objects according to new taxonomies, sometimes classifying according to size, shape, and shade, while at other times she resorts to haphazard gathering, mounding, and containing."[3] She goes on to explain that "Pink Project" "summarizes a hyperbolic femininity produced and mediated through the dissemination of products: girls’ dolls, baby pacifiers, hair accessories, mirrors, fake nails, cleaning products, and so on." Writing in the New York Times, Holland Cotter said, “Both assemblages generate a number of ideas, from how a culture infantilizes women and then markets that notion of femininity, to the way practically everyone shapes a sense of self through the accumulation of disposable things.”[4] “Pink Project: Table” was shown again in 2016 at the Frieze Art Fair, London.[5]
Pink Project Table (Detail)
Boetzkes further characterizes "Pink Projects" and another work, "Green Piece", as considering "the cultural significance of commodities through their accumulation and redistribution." She goes on to explain that in her view, Munson's work "can be taken as a protracted meditation on the materiality of plastic, as objects cycle from absurd commodity to meaningless thing to excessive substance." In "Green Piece," Boetzkes explains that "green politics is made explicit, as green is shown in the proliferation of objects needed to tend suburban lawns – fly swatters, lawn furniture, garden hoses, yard tools, AstroTurf, bug spray – alongside plastic cucumbers and artificial plants."[3]
Other major works include “Bound Angel”, first exhibited in a solo show at P·P·O·W in 2022, a large-scale installation of a table adorned with mostly white figurines depicting angels, madonnas and “perfect” women, bound with ropes and string. John Vincler, of the New York Times, wrote about the show: “It’s hard to pull off the alchemist’s trick of turning tchotchkes and kitsch into art gold, but the Catskill, New York-based artist Portia Munson manages this handily, as if a rigorous method were applied to a hoarder’s madness, with intuitive groupings and hints of classification discernible within the clutter.” Vincler continues, “[The work’s] … hit differently in the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Either bound or reduced to cheap commodities, the femme body is offered up, fragmented and put on display, all but asking aloud: Whose bodily autonomy?” [6]
Portia Munson's work has been the subject of over twenty solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Bedford Gallery, The Museum of Sex, New York, NY, Walnut Creek, CA; and Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY, among others. Munson’s work has also been included in numerous international group exhibitions including, Still, Life! Mourning, Meaning, Mending, 21c Louisville, Louisville, KY; Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and our Contemporary Moment, Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY; Dime-Store Alchemy, curated by Jonathan Rider, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Beyond Boundaries: Feminine Forms, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Objectophilia; Biennial of the Americas, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; and Bad Girls, curated by Marcia Tucker, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, among others.[7] In summer 2022, Munson presented three solo exhibitions, Bound Angel, P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Portia Munson: Flood, Art Omi, Ghent, NY; and Memento Mori, Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY. In 2023, her work was included in Rituals of Devotion at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Portia Munson: The Pink Bedroom was exhibited at the Museum of Sex, New York, NY in 2023.
Munson’s public works include “Pink Projects” with the Art Production Fund, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY (2019);[8] “Art in the Terminal,” the Albany International Airport, Albany, NY;[9] MTA Arts for Transit, Bryant Park MTA Station, New York, NY. Munson was commissioned in 2012 by the Arts and Design program of New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to create a permanent laminated glass display for the Fort Hamilton Parkway station, on the elevated portion of the West End (D train) line. Munson's artwork “Gardens of Fort Hamilton Parkway Station” consists of symmetrical arrangements of flowers, florets, petals and weeds from her own garden.[10]
Her work is in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; 21C International Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, Ky.; The Museum of Sex, New York, NY, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mo.[11]
Exhibitions
2023 “Portia Munson: The Pink Bedroom,” Museum of Sex, New York, NY
2022 “Bound Angel,” P·P·O·W, New York, NY
2022 “Memento Mori,” Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY
2022 “Portia Munson: Flood,” The Newmark Gallery at Art Omi, Ghent, NY
2021 “Memento Mori Mandalas,” Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, New York
2019 “Pink Projects,” Art Production Fund, Rockefeller Center, New York, New York
2018 “Her World/Her Room”, Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, California
2018 “Flood,” Disjecta, Portland, Oregon
2017 “The Garden,” PPOW Gallery, New York
2015 “Dear Mother Nature,” Mills Gallery, Central College, Pella, Iowa
2015 “Botanicals Below Bryant Park,” MTA Bryant Park Station, New York
2013 “Reflecting Pool,” PPOW Gallery, New York
2011 “Color Forms,” Mass MoCa, North Adams, Mass.
2010 “Portia Munson,” Liebowitz Gallery, Bard College at Simon's Rock, Great Barrington, Mass.
2007 “Green,” PPOW Gallery, New York
2005 “Flower Mandalas,” PPOW Gallery, New York
2001 “Green Piece: Lawn,” School House Center, Silas-Kenyon Gallery, Provincetown, Mass.
Frederic Edwin Church was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets. Church's paintings put an emphasis on realistic detail, dramatic light, and panoramic views. He debuted some of his major works in single-painting exhibitions to a paying and often enthralled audience in New York City. In his prime, he was one of the most famous painters in the United States.
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th-century American art movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic vision was influenced by Romanticism. Early on, the paintings typically depicted the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountains.
Chris Doyle is a multi-media artist who was born in Pennsylvania, in 1959. He is currently working and living in Brooklyn, New York, and Mexico City, Mexico. In his animation-based practice, he explores aspiration and progress, his main goal is to question “the foundation of a culture consumed by striving.” Through his work, he seeks to depict a world anxious in the shadow of a looming apocalypse, where environmental disaster and social inequities continue with increasing prevalence and complexity. To further drive his focus of restoration and conservation, his work often features industrial ruin, debris, and waste.
Teresita Fernández is a New York-based visual artist best known for her public sculptures and unconventional use of materials. Her work is characterized by a reconsideration of landscape and issues of visibility. Fernández’s practice generates psychological topographies that prompt the subjective reshaping of spatial and historical awareness. Her experiential, large-scale works are often inspired by natural landscapes, investigating the historical, geological, and anthropological realms in flux. Her sculptures present optical illusions and evoke natural phenomena, land formations, and water.
Raymond Han was an American painter who was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1931, and died in upstate New York in 2017. After study with Willson Young Stamper (1912–1988) at the Honolulu Museum of Art, Han moved to New York City and studied at the Art Students League of New York with Frank Mason and Robert Beverly Hale (1901–1985). Han lived and worked in upstate New York for the last period of his working life.
Jean Shin is an American artist living in Brooklyn, NY. She is known for creating elaborate sculptures and site-specific installations using accumulated cast-off materials.
Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz, also known as Martin & Muñoz are artists who collaborate to create dystopian sculptures and large photographic works often based on dioramas.
Duke Riley is an American artist. Riley earned a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a MFA in Sculpture from the Pratt Institute. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is noted for a body of work incorporating the seafarer's craft with nautical history, as well as the host of a series of illegal clambakes on the Brooklyn waterfront for the New York artistic community. Riley told the Village Voice that he has "always been interested in the space where water meets land in the urban landscape."
Stephen Westfall is an American painter, critic, and professor at Rutgers University and Bard College.
Martha Wilson is an American feminist performance artist and the founding director of Franklin Furnace Archive art organization. Over the past four decades she has developed and "created innovative photographic and video works that explore her female subjectivity through role-playing, costume transformation, and 'invasions' of other peoples personas". She is a recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and an Obie Award and a Bessie Award for commitment to artists’ freedom of expression. She is represented by P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York City.
Melanie Smith is a British artist based in Mexico City.
Sarah Oppenheimer is a New York City-based artist whose projects explore the articulations and experience of built space. Her work involves precise transformations of architecture that disrupt, subvert or shuffle visitors' visual and bodily experience. Artforum critic Jeffrey Kastner wrote that Oppenheimer's artworks "typically induce a certain kind of vaguely vertiginous, almost giddy uncertainty" that over time turns "indeterminacies of apprehension into epistemological uncertainties, epistemic puzzlement into ontological perplexity."
Cynthia Carlson is an American visual artist, living and working in New York.
Ann Agee is an American visual artist whose practice centers on ceramic figurines, objects and installations, hand-painted wallpaper drawings, and sprawling exhibitions that merge installation art, domestic environment and showroom. Her art celebrates everyday objects and experiences, decorative and utilitarian arts, and the dignity of work and craftsmanship, engaging issues involving gender, labor and fine art with a subversive, feminist stance. Agee's work fits within a multi-decade shift in American art in which ceramics and considerations of craft and domestic life rose from relegation to second-class status to recognition as "serious" art. She first received critical attention in the influential and divisive "Bad Girls" exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum in 1994, where she installed a functional, handmade ceramic bathroom, rendered in the classic blue-and-white style of Delftware. Art in America critic Lilly Wei describes Agee's later work as "the mischievous, wonderfully misbegotten offspring of sculpture, painting, objet d'art, and kitschy souvenir."
Cheryl Donegan is an American conceptual artist. She is known for her video works, such as Head (1993) and Kiss My Royal Irish Ass (1992), which targeted the cliches of the female body in art and other issues of art politics.
Kathy Grove is an American conceptual feminist photographer. As a professional photo retoucher for fashion magazines, Grove became familiar with airbrushing and photo manipulation techniques in that industry. Her work uses those skills to remove subjects from iconic works, or to alter their appearance. Grove wrote that this practice is intended to "portray women as they have been regarded throughout history, invisible and inaudible."[2] Her photo series, The Other Series, includes reproductions of canonical paintings in Western art with the feminine subjects removed.
Maureen Connor is an American artist who creates installations and videos dealing with human resources and social justice. She is known internationally for her work from the 1980s to the present, which focuses on gender and its modes of representation.
Janet Henry is a visual artist based in New York City.
Katharine Kuharic is an American artist known for multi-layered representational paintings that combine allegory, humor, social critique, and aspects of Pop and pastoral art. Her art typically employs painstaking brushwork, high-keyed, almost hallucinogenic color, discontinuities of scale, and compositions packed with a profusion of hyper-real detail, figures and associations. She has investigated themes including queer sexual and political identity, American excess and suburban culture, social mores, the body and death. Artist-critic David Humphrey called Kuharic "a visionary misuser" who reconfigures disparate elements into a "Queer Populist Hallucinatory Realism" of socially charged image-sentences that shake out ideologies from "the congealed facts of contemporary culture" and celebrate the possibility of an alternative order.
Adam Putnam is an American visual artist working primarily with photography, drawing, and performance art. Putnam is a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.
References
↑ Scobie, Ilka (29 January 2007). "Petal Perfection"(PDF). artnet Magazine. Retrieved 3 January 2017.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
