Art Basel Miami Beach · Meridians

Portia Munson

Booth M4

December 4 - 8, 2024

Art Basel Miami Beach · Meridians - Portia Munson - Art Fairs - PPOW

For Art Basel Miami Beach Meridians, P·P·O·W is pleased to present Portia Munson’s Bound Angel, 2021. For over three decades, Munson has created maximal installations, sculptures, paintings, and digital prints using a vast accumulation of ready-made consumer products to decipher the latent cultural codes embedded in mass-produced items. Combing through thrift stores, yard sales, and flea markets, Munson collects hundreds of objects, each one a surrogate for the thousands just like it around the world. Furthering this decades-long investigation, Bound Angel examines the impact of mass production on the formation of identity and the resulting connection between the ongoing struggle for gender equality, reproductive rights, and the dire ecological crisis.

First shown in Munson’s 2022 solo exhibition with the gallery, Bound Angel comprises hundreds of second-hand objects in the form of female angels, including figurines of the Virgin Mary, nude statuettes, snow globes, candle holders, lamps, soap dispensers, and more. Munson carefully wraps each object with lamp cords and rope, blinding, stifling, and entangling them to reveal the omnipresence of prescribed femininity. Organized on an immense oval dining table covered in a tablecloth composed of wedding dresses, the sculpture takes the shape of a faceless bride struggling against her binds. In her article on Bound Angel for Art Basel, Colony Little writes “Within this tableau are items intentionally bound together to mimic polarized, outmoded, and damaging perceptions of femininity, the most legible being the Madonna-Whore complex. The presence of these objects also implicates the viewer, tying them to the subconscious coding they continue to receive – and reinforce through the items they choose to hold close.”

Portia Munson (b. 1961) lives and works in Catskill, NY. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union, an MFA from Rutgers University, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has been awarded residencies at institutions including Fountainhead, Miami, FL; Woodman Residency Foundation, Tuscany, Italy; Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy; MacDowell Colony for the Arts, Peterborough, NH; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY, as well as a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2019. Munson’s work has also been in numerous international group exhibitions including 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; and Bad Girls, curated by Marcia Tucker, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, among others. Her work has been the subject of over twenty solo exhibitions at Museum of Sex, New York, NY; P·P·O·W, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; and Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY, among others. Her public works include Pink Projects with the Art Production Fund, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY; Art in the Terminal, the Albany International Airport, Albany, NY; MTA Arts for Transit, Bryant Park MTA Station, New York, NY; and a permanent Metropolitan Transit Authority installation in Brooklyn, NY. 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. Her work is included in the 2023 exhibition Rituals of Devotion at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. In 2023, Munson presented Portia Munson: The Pink Bedroom at the Museum of Sex, New York, NY.

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