2026 Keynote: Portia Munson
Portia Munson, studio portrait, 2025, photo by Helen Ho
Portia Munson creates maximal installations, sculptures, paintings, and digital prints using a vast accumulation of ready-made products to decipher the latent cultural codes embedded in mass-produced items. The resulting works emphasize the role of consumerism on the formation of identity and the connection between the ongoing struggle for gender equality, reproductive rights, and the dire ecological crisis. Munson 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. Her work has been the subject of over twenty solo exhibitions at the Museum of Sex, New York, NY; P·P·O·W, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Art Omi, Ghent, 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. Munson’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, Dazed, VICE/Creators Project, & Bust Magazine. She received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2019). Portia Munson is represented by PPOW Gallery.