Martin Wong (1946-1999) is best known for deploying a unique visual lexicon of stacked bricks, crumbling tenements, constellations and hand signals to passionately render urban life. With Picture Show at Semaphore Gallery in 1986, Wong confronted the gentrification of New York City’s Lower East Side in a series of life-size paintings that depict gated facades. In his artist statement, Wong wrote, “I wanted to focus in close on some of the endless layers of conflict and confinement that have us all bound together in this life without possibility of parole.” P·P·O·W will present one work from the series, Poetry Storefront, 1986, which documents the Nuyorican Poets’ Café on East 6th Street, founded by Miguel Algarían and Mickey Piñero. This seminal work will be exhibited alongside an untitled, undated work that exemplifies Wong’s use of stacked bricks and sign language as both metaphor and motif. Rigorously painted on a heart-shaped canvas, this brick wall bears a blue ASL plaque that reads “For Sale”. Wong was active in the performance art groups, The Cockettes and Angels of Light before moving to New York in 1978. He exhibited for two decades at notable downtown galleries including EXIT ART, Semaphore and P·P·O·W, among others. Wong died in San Francisco from an AIDS related illness. His work is represented in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 1998, Wong had a one person at the New Museum, New York. Human Instamatic, a comprehensive retrospective, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts, New York, in 2015; Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio in 2016; and UC Berkeley Art Museum in 2017.

Carolee Schneemann (1939- 2019) activated the female nude with a multidisciplinary practice that spanned sixty years and included painting, assemblage, performance, and film. Her paintings form the 1950s and 60s initially harnessed the lineage of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism, but quickly transitioned into painting-constructions, kinetic sculptures, films and performances. In 1993, Schneemann declared, “I’m a painter. I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.” Personae: JT and Three Kitch's, 1957, uses confident brushstrokes and rich polychrome to depict the nude male form of her then-partner and frequent collaborator James Tenney. This work is suspected to be the cause of her expulsion from Bard for ‘moral turpitude’. Schneemann’s ensuing career was plagued with censorship, which both stymied and stimulated her explorations of patriarchal conventions and desire to evidence a deep history of female iconography. Schneemann has exhibited worldwide, at institutions including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate Modern, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and The Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid. The comprehensive retrospective Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Paintings recently traveled from Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2015), to the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2017) and MoMA PS1, New York (2018). On Saturday, December 7, Art Basel Conversations will hold a panel discussion entitled “Double Knowledge: The Legacy of Carolee Schneemann.”

Rooted in the California Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) combines modes of abstract expressionism with Bay Area figuration to create uniquely irradiant paintings. Approaching figuration through abstracted forms, Linhares utilizes broad brushstrokes and fields of color to gradually develop her subjects. Celebrating the female body, collectivity, and communal experience, her band of sirens climb trees, ride on horseback, or delight in drunken revelry. Such subject matter is inspired by her upbringing and imagination, and the resulting works are surreal or fantastical depictions of everyday activities and objects. Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. She was included in the influential Bad Painting exhibition at the New Museum, organized by legendary curator Marcia Tucker. In the early 1990s, a traveling survey, Dangerous Pleasures: The Art of Judith Linhares, toured museums and galleries on both coasts. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally and is included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ Contemporary Art: Five Propositions through May 4, 2020. Linhares is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has received multiple grants from the National Endowments for the Arts. Her work is held in many permanent collections, including the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

Erin M. Riley (b. 1985) is a fiber artist who renders erotic, personal and psychologically raw imagery in hand-dyed wool tapestries. Her work explores the innate difficulty of womanhood, objectification of the female body, and traumas both large and small that weigh on the search for self-identity. Often autobiographical, Riley’s tapestries explore aspects of personal or family history, as well as local news story and popular media narratives – images that are essential to processing her own experiences and to destigmatizing trauma. Riley received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions throughout the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Australia. Riley has lectured extensively throughout the country and has had residencies at The MacDowell Colony, NH and the Museum of Art and Design, NY. Used Tape, Riley’s debut exhibition at P·P·O·W took place in May 2018. In her review for the New York Times, Jillian Steinhauer writes, “Ms. Riley successfully intertwines two strands of second-wave feminist art: the reclamation of so-called craft mediums and women’s use of their bodies. Into this she braids the distanced gaze of the still life. If the show has a thesis statement, it might be that for women, pain and pleasure remain perilously intertwined — a lesson that bears repeating in the time of #MeToo.”

Drawing on American naturalist and realist traditions, George Boorujy (b. 1973) creates immaculately rendered large scale portraits of animals both alive and extinct. Based on his extensive research into Florida’s ecosystem, Boorujy has recently turned his focus to Floridian animals that are extinct due to the growing global environmental crisis. Maintaining scientific and anatomical exactness, Boorujy’s creatures are now flooded, swept away, and in the process of being transformed by the invisible yet powerful force of their changing environments. An environmental activist, Boorujy has imbued his most recent work with a newfound urgency and mourning of our vanishing natural world. Boorujy attended the University of Miami intending to study marine biology and fine art. After traveling North America, he obtained his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 2002. His conceptual project ‘The New York Pelagic Project’ has circulated his drawings across the Atlantic and has garnered considerable critical attention. Boorujy has exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, including a solo exhibition at the Central Park Arsenal in New York City. Boorujy lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.