Portia Munson
Quick Facts
Biography
Portia Munson (born 1961) is an American visual artist who works in sculpture, installation, painting and digital photography, focusing on themes related to the environment and feminism. Her work includes large-scale agglomerations of mass-produced plastic found objects arranged by color, as well as small oil paintings of individual domestic found objects, and digital photographs of flowers, weeds and dead animals found near her home in upstate New York.
Munson received a BFA from Cooper Union School of Art in 1981 and earned an MFA from Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University in 1990. She also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine.
Munson first achieved notoriety with her work “Pink Project: Table” in the "Bad Girls" show at the New Museum, New York, in 1994. That piece, consisting of thousands of pink plastic found objects spread out on a table, also appeared in Munson's 1994 solo show at Yoshii Gallery in New York, along with sculptures comprising accumulations of pink objects encased in glass vitrines. Writing in the New York Times, Holland Cotter said, “Both assemblages generate a number of ideas, from how a culture infantilizes women and then markets that notion of femininity, to the way practically everyone shapes a sense of self through the accumulation of disposable things.”“Pink Project: Table” was shown again in 2016 at the Frieze Art Fair, London.
Munson was commissioned in 2012 by the Arts and Design program of New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority to create a permanent laminated glass display for the Fort Hamilton Parkway station, on the elevated portion of the West End (D train) line. Munson's artwork “Gardens of Fort Hamilton Parkway Station” consists of symmetrical arrangements of flowers, florets, petals and weeds from her own garden.
Her work is in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; 21C International Contemporary Art Museum, Louisville, Ky., and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Mo.
Exhibitions
- 2017 “The Garden,” PPOW Gallery, New York
- 2015 “Dear Mother Nature,” Mills Gallery, Central College, Pella, Iowa
- 2015 “Botanicals Below Bryant Park,” MTA Bryant Park Station, New York
- 2013 “Reflecting Pool,” PPOW Gallery, New York
- 2011 “Color Forms,” Mass MoCa, North Adams, Mass.
- 2010 “Portia Munson,” Liebowitz Gallery, Bard College at Simon's Rock, Great Barrington, Mass.
- 2007 “Green,” PPOW Gallery, New York
- 2005 “Flower Mandalas,” PPOW Gallery, New York
- 2001 “Green Piece: Lawn,” School House Center, Silas-Kenyon Gallery, Provincetown, Mass.
- 1996 “The Garden,” Yoshii Gallery, New York
- 1994 “Portia Munson,” Yoshii Gallery, New York
- 1994 “Bad Girls,” New Museum, New York