Art Basel Miami Beach
December 5 - 8, 2019
Booth E16
P·P·O·W is pleased to present historical and contemporary works by Martin Wong, David Wojnarowicz, Carolee Schneemann, Hilary Harkness, Judith
Linhares, Gerald Lovell, Erin M. Riley, Allison Schulnik, George Boorujy and
Portia Munson. We are also delighted to present Portia Munson’s immersive
installation The Garden, 1996, in the inaugural edition of Meridians.
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.
David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was among the most incisive
and prolific American artists of the 1980s and 90s. Channeling a vast
accumulation of raw images, sounds, memories and lived experiences, Wojnarowicz
became well known for his spray-painted iconographies, blunt semiotics and
graphic illustrations that deftly conveyed his cultural critiques.
Wojnarowicz’s work has been exhibited 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. 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 has been reviewed in Artforum, The Guardian, The
New York Times and The New Yorker, among others. The retrospective, which
traveled to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid in May 2019, is currently on view at
the Musee d/Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City through February 2020.
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.”
Hilary Harkness (b. 1971) meticulously renders reimagined histories that comment on
sociocultural forces with a distinctly contemporary sensibility. For the
Kabinett program, P·P·O·W will present an erotic fantasy centered on the making
of mid-19th century American mythology inspired by Winslow Homer’s Prisoners
from the Front, 1866. Harkness’s interpretation of this iconic work takes
place over in a trio of narrative scenes, including an interracial romance
between Union General Francis Channing Barlow and Arabella Freeman, a Virginia
landowner. Contextualized by an ongoing series of intimate landscape paintings
that Harkness has steadily executed since 2016, these paintings provide
different accounts of the legacy of slavery and the Great Migration, enriching
the complex morality of both American history and the history of American Art.
Harkness holds a BA from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from
Yale University. She has exhibited worldwide, including Museo
Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; American Academy of Arts and Letters, and
Deste Foundation, Athens, Greece. Her work is in the permanent collection of
the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 2003 to 2019, she was represented by
Mary Boone Gallery. In 2014, she co-curated Roy Lichtenstein: Nudes and
Interiors at FLAG Art Foundation. In 2017, she received the Henry Clews
Award and attended the inaugural Master Residency Program at the Château de La
Napoule in France.
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.
Born in Chicago to Puerto Rican and African American
parents, Gerald Lovell (b. 1992) began his artistic practice
after dropping out of the graphic design program at the University of West
Georgia. Now based in Atlanta, the self-taught painter uses a unique
combination of interspersed impasto and flat planes of color to create
mesmerizing and strikingly life-like portraits, which describe the lived
experiences of his family and peers. Attuned to the inherent struggles of his
chosen medium, Lovell uses his paintings as a means of self-discovery and self-articulation
while careful not to impose narratives on his subjects. Through painting Lovell
captures the present moment in order to preserve and honor it. His work has
been featured in exhibitions at The Gallery | Wish, Atlanta, GA; the Hammonds
House Museum, Atlanta, GA; Mason Fine Art, Atlanta, GA; and Swim Gallery, Los
Angeles, CA.
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.”
Seamlessly transitioning between painting, sculpture, and
animation, Allison Schulnik (b. 1978) paints with a dense
impasto and chooses subjects that meld theatricality with emotional
vulnerability. Sourcing images from domestic life, nature, dreams, and
childhood memories both real and imagined, Schulnik explores the murky and
sometimes farcical terrain of nostalgia and the macabre. P·P·O·W will present recent paintings
that express her life as seen through the red haze of Palm Desert, where she
and her husband currently live, work, and raise their newborn baby, Tupelo.
Schulnik also works in animation, a medium she has employs as an extension of
background in dance. Schulnik lives and works in Sky Valley, CA. She has
exhibited internationally at festivals and museums including the Hammer Museum,
LACMA, Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Animafest
Zagreb. Solo exhibitions of Schulnik’s work have been presented at the
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna
Beach, CA; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, OK; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art,
Overland Park, KS; Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles; ZieherSmith, New York, NY;
and Galeria Javier Lopez & Fer Frances, Madrid. Schulnik's work
can be found in numerous museum collections including the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Santa Barbara Art Museum;
Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal); Laguna Art Museum; The Crocker Art Museum;
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; and The Albright-Knox Gallery. P·P·O·W will
present a solo exhibition of new works in Spring 2020.
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.
For over two decades, Portia
Munson (b. 196) has created maximal installations, paintings
and sculptures that harness a vast array of synthetic products. Alongside a
selection of oil paintings, P·P·O·W will present Her Coffin, 2016, a
glass box filled with thousands of discarded pink plastic products manufactured
for and marketed towards women and girls.
Munson has long been interested in colors that are used to signify and
commodify gender and the way the colors have been strategically modulated for
different generations. Her Coffin acts as a time capsule, depicting what
Munson describes as “this carcinogenic plastic moment in time.” As part of the
inaugural edition of Meridians, Munson will present The Garden, 1996, an
immersive installation which takes the form of a woman’s bedroom densely
layered with floral dresses, stuffed animals, furniture, and fake flowers.
Seductive and repulsive, this installation amplifies capitalism’s vision of bourgeois
femininity, where the act of acquiring to meet societal standards fuels the
momentum of hyper-consumption and climate crisis. 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; Kunsthallen Brandts Klaedefabrik, Odense, Denmark;
Portsmouth Museum of Fine Art, Portsmouth, NH; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Wave
Hill, Bronx, NY; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and
The Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, among others. She is represented in numerous private and
public collections, including 21C Museum (Louisville, KY), Nerman Museum of Contemporary
Art, Kansas City, MO, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, Lyndhurst, OH, The
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA and the U.S. Department of
State. In 2019, Munson was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
