The Museum of Sex is pleased to announce Portia Munson: The Pink Bedroom, opening to the public on January 27, 2023. Visitors will be immersed in a world of pink, exploring new work alongside thirty years of Portia Munson’s (b.1961) Pink Project (1994 – ongoing) which features everyday items that pose questions about mass consumerism, constructions of femininity and sexual objectification.
Through her prescient drawings, paintings and signature maximalist installations, Portia Munson centers the many, and often conflicting, expectations we put on the production and consumption of the female body. These ideas are showcased through her playful selection and presentation of objects including bulbous breasts, humorous crotch clenching nutcrackers, innocent dolls, sexy lingerie, and suggestive vessels. Portia Munson: The Pink Bedroom is the first presentation of Munson’s work at The Museum of Sex, and will feature a new sculpture titled Nude II (2022), and a site-specific iteration of the Pink Project: Bedroom (1994 – ongoing) that skirts the line between empowerment and entrapment. By confronting us with the many plastic things we acquire, revere or discard, Portia Munson: The Pink Bedroom makes space for a pleasure that is complex and subjective.
“The Pink Project: Bedroom was like creating a girl dream space, or a womb dream space,” says Portia Munson. “Comprised of repurposed objects, furniture and clothing, the bedroom is a complete environment of mass-produced objects marketed towards girls and women… Found detritus that are both seductive and repulsive at the same time … all the stuff ‘girls’ ‘need’.”
Portia Munson (b.1961) lives and works in Catskill, NY. She holds a BFA from Cooper Union, an MFA from Rutgers University, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She has been awarded residencies at institutions including Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy; MacDowell Colony for the Arts, Peterborough, NH; Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. Munson was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2019. Her work has been the subject of over twenty solo exhibitions at P·P·O·W, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA; and Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY, among others. Munson’s work has also been included in numerous international group exhibitions including, Still, Life! Mourning, Meaning, Mending, 21c Louisville, Louisville, KY; Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and our Contemporary Moment, Olana State Historic Site, Hudson, NY; Dime-Store Alchemy, curated by Jonathan Rider, FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY; Beyond Boundaries: Feminine Forms, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Objectophilia; Biennial of the Americas of the Americas, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO; and Bad Girls, curated by Marcia Tucker, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, among others. Her public works include Pink Projects with the Art Production Fund, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY; Art in the Terminal, the Albany International Airport, Albany, NY; MTA Arts for Transit, Bryant Park MTA Station, New York, NY; and a permanent Metropolitan Transit Authority installation in Brooklyn, NY. In summer 2022, Munson presented three solo exhibitions, Bound Angel, P·P·O·W, New York, NY; Portia Munson: Flood, Art Omi, Ghent, NY; and Memento Mori, Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY. Her work will be included in the upcoming exhibition Rituals of Devotionat the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, CA.
The museum will host a private opening reception on the evening of Thursday, January 26th and the exhibition will open to the public on Friday, January 27th.
Portia Munson: The Pink Bedroom will be on view from January 27 through July 2023. This exhibition is curated by Emily Shoyer, Curator at Large at the Museum of Sex in collaboration with PPOW Gallery, New York. The exhibition is generously sponsored by Satisfyer.
The Museum of Sex is located at 233 Fifth Avenue at 27th Street in NYC.
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On a similar note, we look back at the work of artist Barbara Lubliner, who celebrated intimate female energy in her series ‘Flower Lips’ as part of the group exhibition ‘Members Only’ at Living with Art Salon in 2021.