Art Basel Paris

Since her residency at the Kohler Arts Center in 1991, Ann Agee (b. 1959) has focused her practice on replicating objects by hand, a process employed to simulate mass production and engage ambiguous delineations between fine art, design, and craft; histories of cultural appropriation and exchange; and the range of women’s lived experiences. Agee is a leading member in a pioneering generation of feminist ceramicists who have brought the art form to the forefront of contemporary discourses as sculpture. She earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 1981 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1986. Her work has been included in notable group exhibitions, including: 1994’s Bad Girls, the New Museum, NY; 2009’s Dirt on Delight, the Institute of Contemporary Art, PA, and the Walker Art Center, MN; and 2008’s Conversations in Clay, the Katonah Art Museum, NY. This year, she was honored with Cooper Union’s Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award, previously having received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among others. Her works are included in the permanent collection of notable institutions including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the RISD Art Museum, RI; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Henry Art Museum in Seattle, WA; the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, FL. Agee’s work was exhibited as part of To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, and in manifesto of fragility, the 16th Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art, Lyon, France. Her legacy with Kohler Arts Center continues to expand as she is featured in the group show Lunch Break: Arts/Industry in Between, on view through Spring 2025. She will have a solo exhibition at the Currier Museum, Manchester, NH, in February 2025.  

For Gerald Lovell (b. 1992), painting is an act of biography. Combining flat and impressionistic painting with thick daubs of impasto, Lovell creates monumental, loving scenes often lost to the abyss of memory. His portraits refuse the notion that all Black figures put down on canvas are somehow political. Rather, his work records a deep commitment to fostering alternative community narratives by imbuing his subjects with social agency and self-determinative power, while also revealing individualistic details that lay their essential humanity bare.  Referencing Northern Baroque male group portraiture in works such as Wes, Tenizen, & Seneca (2024), he depicts a fleeting moment of Black male love and fatherhood in the face of bigotry, violence, and expectations of masculinity. Wes, a fellow artist and mentor to Lovell based in Amsterdam, is depicted in the candid moment of loving embrace of his two young sons. Harkening to the pyramidal composition of classical Mother and Child imagery, here it is a Black man who creates an armature of love, care, and protection. Refusing to succumb to generational expectations of masculinity, Lovell’s unabashedly tender portrait affirms the resilient power of Black male friendship, even when constantly threatened by violence and discrimination. Born in Chicago, IL, and raised in Atlanta, GA, Lovell currently lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Jeffrey Deitch, Moore Building, Miami, FL; Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC; MINT, Atlanta, GA; and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, CH; among others. In 2022, Lovell’s work was on view in What is Left Unspoken, Love at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and featured in a concurrent publication with DelMonico Books. His work is now in the museum’s permanent collection. Lovell completed the Fountainhead Artists Residency in October 2023. Featuring work honoring the terrains of his past and expressing gratitude for new horizons, his second exhibition with P·P·O·W, verde, was held in Spring 2024. Born in Chicago, IL, and raised in Atlanta, GA, Lovell currently lives and works in New York City. He has exhibited at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Jeffrey Deitch, Moore Building, Miami, FL; Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC; MINT, Atlanta, GA; and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, CH; among others. In 2022, Lovell’s work was on view in What is Left Unspoken, Love at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, and featured in a concurrent publication with DelMonico Books. His work is now in the museum’s permanent collection. Lovell completed the Fountainhead Artists Residency in October 2023. Featuring pieces honoring the terrains of his past and expressing gratitude for new horizons, his second exhibition with P·P·O·W, verde, was held in Spring 2024. His artistic process was discussed in The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing, published by Penguin Press. He is currently working towards three-person exhibition he will be featured in and co-curate, opening at Johnson Lowe Gallery in Spring 2025. 

Known for her unabashed portrayals of the female body and sexual desire, Betty Tompkins (b. 1945) has been shunned, seized, censored, and celebrated in the five decades since she first began her iconic Fuck Paintings series. A self-proclaimed “accidental dissident,” Tompkins has ceaselessly questioned the rules of representation of women’s bodies and what governs them. Beginning her career during a period in which pornographic imagery was contested by both ends of the American political spectrum, Tompkins found the ‘charge’ she was looking for in the radically explicit source imagery she continues to mine. Tompkins’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Centre Pompidou, Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY; Shelly & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York, NY, among others. She has presented recent solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; GAVLAK, Los Angeles, CA; Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium; J Hammond Projects, London; The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY; and Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Lacan, the Exhibition: When Art Meets Psychoanalysis, Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz, France; Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Histórias da sexualidade, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paolo, Brazil; Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texas; and Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others. In 2021, MO.CO. Montpellier Contemporain presented Betty Tompkins: Raw Material, a revelatory survey exhibition accompanied by a monograph with specially commissioned texts by Nicolas Bourriaud, Alison M. Gingeras and Géraldine Gourbe, as well as a conversation with Tompkins. In Summer 2024, P·P·O·W presented Just a Pretty Face, Tompkins’s her third solo exhibition with the gallery. This fall, she will be featured in Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. 

David Wojnarowicz (1954 -1992) was among the most incisive and prolific American artists of the 1980s and 90s. Wojnarowicz’s work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The American Center, Paris, France; The Busan Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Centro Galego de Art Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; The Barbican Art Gallery, London; and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. His work is in permanent collections of major museums nationally and internationally and his life and work have been the subject of significant scholarly studies including Cynthia Carr’s Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (2012), winner of a Lambda Literary Award for “Gay Memoir/Biography’’ and finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize awarded by Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Wojnarowicz has had retrospectives at the galleries of the Illinois State University, curated by Barry Blinderman, 1990, and at the New Museum, curated by Dan Cameron, 1999. A third retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night, co-curated by David Kiehl and David Breslin, opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in July 2018. The widely acclaimed exhibition traveled to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in May 2019, and the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City in November 2019. A concurrent exhibition of Wojnarowicz’s films and photographs opened at the KW Berlin in 2019. Wojnarowicz: Fuck You Faggot Fucker, a comprehensive feature-length documentary directed by Chris McKim, premiered in November 2020 and was named one of 2021’s best documentaries by Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Esquire, and IndieWire, among others. In 2022, the solo exhibition Dear Jean Pierre: The David Wojnarowicz Correspondence with Jean Pierre Delage, 1979-1982 at P·P·O·W unveiled an archive of letters, drawings, and photographs from Wojnarowicz’s early career, followed by the release of a catalogue published by Primary Information in 2023. This past September, P·P·O·W and the David Wojnarowicz Foundation mounted a citywide series of programs in celebration of the artist’s would-be 70th birthday, with screenings, performances, and activations taking place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art; and the NYC AIDS Memorial.