A grisaille, airbrushed painting of a vagina overlooks the bustling Tribeca neighborhood through a window from where it hangs at P·P·O·W. Cropped and zoomed-in, the image could easily be mistaken for an abstract painting of hazy, gray hills. In the center is a string of words rendered in pink, stacked on top of one another in a vertical sentence. Their hue is happy and innocent, belying the rude nature of the message that reads: “BETTY WOULD BE A BETTER STUDENT IF SHE DIDN’T TALK SO MUCH IN CLASS.” Part of Betty Tompkins’s Just a Pretty Face, this painting Betty would… (2018), offers a relatively tame taste of what’s inside the gallery, its text a harbinger from adolescence of the censorship, erasure, and silencing the artist would face over the next several decades. Such images of genitalia sourced from pornography with text about women are a combination Tompkins has become known for. Additional salacious views are included in the show. Joining these are two lesser-known, rarely exhibited bodies of work—nude figures in idyllic landscapes. The first series is drawn in oil crayon on halftone paper and the other painted with acrylic on household objects. Spanning from 1990 to 2024, Just a Pretty Face is a tantalizing view of Tompkins’s humor and an attestation of her enduring ability to put a magnifying glass to misogyny.
The word “no” seems to have an adverse effect on Tompkins. As a young female artist trying to exhibit her work in New York starting in the late 1960s, she experienced galleries continually rejecting her. Being a woman was difficult enough, but being a woman who depicted sex was taboo. Even this, it seems, she wasn’t doing the right way according to the feminist principles of the time, which espoused pornography as perpetuating misogyny and prioritizing male pleasure and the male gaze (other female artists depicting sex drew from their own experiences or imagination, for example). In 1973, the French government censored Tompkins, holding in customs her sexually explicit Fuck Painting #1 (1969) and Fuck Painting #5 (1973), which depicts zoomed-in, cropped images of sexual intercourse that the artist found in her then-husband’s illegal pornography stash. (While not in the exhibition, this significant moment of censorship and her use of pornography have come to define Tompkins’s practice.) Far from stopping her, rejection and silencing freed Tompkins from the pressure of fitting in and she continued to work, focusing on the nude body, including the pornographic scenes that landed her in trouble in the first place. Despite her persistence, Tompkins did not find commercial success and instead taught for decades while still making art to keep from becoming bored, including the seldom-exhibited “Defacements” series (1992–2003) and “Tool Series” (1990–2000) in Just a Pretty Face.
In “Defacements,” Tompkins continued to use pornographic subjects, yet her source material was far less shocking than her censored “Fuck Paintings.” Instead of hardcore porn, she took pages from Wheels and Curves: Erotic Photographs of the Twenties (1994), a photography book featuring risqué images of women and cars. “Ever since the invention of photography, ladies dressed and undressed have been among the favorite subjects of the gents behind the lenses, ”1 the book begins, teasing the misogyny, objectification, and male gaze that fills the remaining pages as nude and partially dressed women pose for “the gents behind the lenses.” Defacing the book as the series title suggests, Tompkins used oil crayon on halftone paper to give the women new idyllic landscapes, likely inspired by her then job teaching landscape painting in New Hampshire for several summers. Removed from the machismo car settings, these women no longer appear to be posing for a male photographer.
Tompkins adds a humorous twist with titles rife with double entendres, including Rear View (1996), an image of a woman bent over and viewed from behind; Cheek to Cheek (1998), two women lying butt to butt; Natural Resources (2002), a nude woman with her body on full view as she arches her back; and Hood Ornament (1999), in which a woman sits on the hood of a car.
Women in landscapes appear again in the other seldom-exhibited “Tool Series.” Equally humorous, this series saw Tompkins use a new material in readymade domestic objects including a cake knife, circular saws, and a frying pan—a play on the objectification of women—upon which she painted figures ranging from salacious nudes to classical statues. Small in scale, these works force the viewer to move closer to fully glimpse the women these objects portray, which also bear humorous titles, such as Bottoms Up (2000), an image of a woman’s nude bottom painted on a frying pan; Disarmed (1993), a one-armed classical statue on an axe; and Fanny (2000), an exposed female butt on a cast iron handle.
Joining these are works from Tompkins’s newer “Insults & Laments” series (2018–2024), which includes the aforementioned painting that greets Tribeca passersby. “Insults & Laments” draws inspiration from the censored “Fuck Paintings” with cropped imagery of genitalia, though without the penetrating penises seen in the earlier series. To create the newer works, Tompkins painted a pink layer of acrylic on canvas and placed vinyl letters that spell out her loaded phrases. After airbrushing the grisailles genitalia, she peeled the vinyl to reveal messages like: “MAKE ME A SANDWICH,” “WHO WILL EVER LOVE YOU WITH A FACE LIKE THAT,” “WHY DO YOU MAKE ME HURT YOU,” “YOU’RE A WHORE,” and “LITTLE GIRL, YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE GETTING INTO.”
Such offensive and charged phrases appear in other of Tompkins’s series. She draws from a variety of sources, sometimes using things said to or about her, sometimes sourced from anonymous people, court documents, and language from the #MeToo movement, depending on the series. The origins, ultimately, don’t matter—any woman can relate to some element of these loaded words. Discrimination, sexism, and misogyny are pervasive, systemic, and a reflection of generations of normalized injustice and violence. Tompkins isn’t inventing these phrases or staging these pornographic scenes. Rather, she’s simply putting a mirror to the world around us.