Portia Munson (b. 1961) Pink Project: Table 1994, originally exhibited in the New Museum’s Bad Girls exhibition, curated by Marcia Tucker, consists of thousands of discarded pink objects which are meticulously arranged on a large table. A visual overload of products created to appeal to women and girls, Pink Project: Table exemplifies that there is no aspect of women’s bodies or identities that corporations have not colonized. Including hair clips, pacifiers, fake fingernails, combs, dildos, cleaning products, tampon applicators, kitchen tools and sundry other items, the work reveals the marking of femininity and the chronic infantilization of what Simone de Beauvoir famously termed “the second sex”. Munson holds a BFA from Cooper Union and a MFA from Rutgers University and has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.  Her work has been exhibited at The New Museum, New York, NY (1994); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2011); The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2012) and The Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki (1996), Finland, among others.

Aurel Schmidt (b. 1982) is best known for her intricate drawings that straddle the line between beauty and decay. With her new body of work, Schmidt combines intricate pencil drawing with gestural charcoal, text, rhinestones, metallic ink and body jewelry. Questioning standard conventions of femininity and masculinity, Schmidt often employs bodily references as a feminist commenting on gender dynamics, but also as anatomical specimens for lovingly meticulous study. Her site-specific installation will consists of three 8 x 4 foot panels that are densely layered with gnarled, natural imagery evoking a forest floor stuffed with vaginal flowers, sinewy roots, hostile beasts and venomous insects. Continuing her subversive appropriation of the Modernist male canon, in this work Schmidt inflects Leon Kossoff’s expressive draftsmanship with her own distinctly urban naturalia to create an environment that functions as a memento mori. Schmidt has exhibited nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Deitch Projects, New York; Peres Projects, Los Angeles and The Fireplace Project, East Hampton; and has organized numerous pop-up exhibitions throughout New York City. Schmidt was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and has contributed to group exhibitions Andrea Rosen, New York; Marianne Boesky, New York; Marlborough Chelsea, New York; Saatchi Gallery, London; 247365, New York and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna. Her work has been featured in published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Interview, Paper, T Magazine and Forbes Magazine. In 2016 she opened her own gallery entitled “Romeo” to show case drawings by artists. Schmidt was born in British Columbia and currently lives and works in New York City. Her debut solo exhibition with P·P·O·W will be in the fall of 2017.

Betty Tompkins (b. 1945) is best known for her acrylic on canvas portrayals of the female body and sexual desire. Having recently garnered well-deserved historical relevance, Tompkins’s radical late-1960s Fuck Paintings resulted in continual censorship by international governments and multi-national corporations. Made from erotic photographs cropped from her husband’s pornography collection, her large-scale, hyper-realistic figurative paintings are built layer by layer, using two airbrush nozzles to apply black and white acrylic. Her work is not meant to arouse fantasy but to transpose light and shade, the effect of the process enveloping the scene in sfumato. Just as Tompkins has based her paintings on the tension of intimacy and representation of sexuality, text and language often drive the subject matter and concept of her ever-evolving series WOMEN Words. Generated through an international network of email contacts, her text-based paintings explore the language ascribed to females. Tompkins has created a piece specifically for Frieze London which focuses on uniquely British words and phrases to describe women. Tompkins lives and works in New York, NY, and Pleasant Mount, PA. Recent solo exhibitions include WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories, Flag Art Foundation, New York (2016); Real Ersatz, FUG, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, New York (2015); Art Basel Feature, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Basel, Switzerland (2014); Paintings & Works on Paper 1972-2013, Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL (2014); Fuck Paintings, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels, Belgium (2012); New Work, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York (2009). Tompkins’s work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including The Shell (LANDSCAPES, PORTRAITS & SHAPES), Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, France (2014); A Drawing Show, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (2014); CORPUS, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland (2014); A Chromatic Loss, Bortolami Gallery, New York (2014); Sunset and Pussy, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2013); Elles, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011). Her debut solo exhibition with P·P·O·W will be in the spring of 2017.

Martin Wong (1946-1999) During the '70s, Wong was active in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene and was involved with the performance art groups The Cockettes and Angels of Light. In 1978 he moved to Manhattan, eventually settling in the Lower East Side, where his attention turned exclusively to painting. Wong set forth to depict urban life on the Lower East Side where he then lived as well as intimate portraits of neighborhood stalwarts, placing his work in line with 20-century painters like Marsden Hartley and Alice Neel. Near the end of his life, Wong turned his focus to his own heritage in his last major body of work, The Chinatown Series. His attention to cultural specificity and performative identity is exemplified by his portrait Mei Lanfang, an intimate study of Mei Lan, the legendary male performer of the Peking Opera who was renowned for leading female roles, or dan. Examining the posture one of his most iconic roles, Chend Dieyi from Farewell My Concubine, Wong’s studied attention to form, pattern and textile conveys the precision and expressiveness of a role set against the sweeping historical backdrop of 20th-Century China. Wong’s work can be found in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of The Arts, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Wong had a one person show Sweet Oblivion at the New Museum (1998). City as Canvas: New York City Graffiti from the Martin Wong Collection opened at the Museum of the City of New York in 2013 and traveled to the Amsterdam Museum in 2016. Wong's retrospective, Human Instamatic, opened at the Bronx Museum of The Arts in November 2015, the Wexner Center in Columbus, OH in May of 2016 and will open at the UC Berkeley Art Museum in San Francisco, California in the fall of 2017.