Portia Munson first came to Provincetown in 1993 as a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. She loved the scrappy in-between-ness of the landscape — flora encroaching on structures, human traces left behind in the sand. But her favorite places? The swap shops.
“I would regularly hit all the swap shops,” she says. She returned to FAWC as a second-year fellow in 1999 and 2000 and did a C-Scape dune shack residency in the interim. Collecting throwaway items remained a throughline. “The swap shop had a really big impact on my work,” says Munson.
As she amassed an array of discarded objects and materials salvaged from transfer stations and tidal debris, Munson noticed a pattern. “I kept finding all this green plastic,” she says. She soon realized it was being used as a marketing tactic. “They were trying to indicate that insecticides or beauty products were natural,” she says. “It’s what we would now call greenwashing, but we didn’t have a word for it then.”
In 2001, this unruly collection culminated in Green Piece: Lawn, exhibited at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown. Composed of a sea of mass-produced green plastic objects, from lawn tools to laundry detergent to “Army junk (real and toy),” the installation was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the environmental wastefulness of lawns, which are presented as a natural phenomenon when really they require large amounts of water and chemicals to produce and maintain.
Munson will return to the Outer Cape from May 29 to 31 as the keynote speaker for the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill’s 19th Encaustic Conference. Now living in Catskill, N.Y., where she moved in the ’90s after years in New York City, Munson herself does not work in encaustic — a highly durable ancient painting technique that uses molten beeswax, tree resin, and pigment applied to a surface such as wood. Yet she says that it’s materially adjacent to her work — disparate elements fused together, objects meant to last.
Munson is known for her maximalist installations, often using a single color to unite sundry consumer artifacts. Her installations consist almost entirely of found objects — “things steps away from a landfill,” she says — and mark material explorations of hyperfemininity and ecological destruction.
Munson’s most-recognized works are her “Pink Projects.” The first installation, Pink Project: Table, appeared in the 1994 exhibition “Bad Girls” at the New Museum in New York. It consisted of thousands of found objects in varying shades of pink, which she’d begun collecting in graduate school at Rutgers as subjects for painting, taxonomized on a table.
She’s currently working on a large-scale all-white installation titled Her Chamber that will be exhibited at New York’s P·P·O·W Gallery (which represents Munson) in January 2027. The walls and ceiling will be covered with white dresses, primarily wedding dresses — “one or two from the 1950s, but most from the past 10 or 15 years,” she says — all sourced from thrift stores. “I’m trying to show a cross-section of this subtle gendered indoctrination that happens,” says Munson.
She doesn’t want the work to feel precious. “One of the dresses that’s part of the ceiling canopy has this big stain, probably chocolate cake,” she says. “I kind of love things like that. They’re secondhand, and if they’re cheap or have a lot of wear, that’s totally fine. That’s better, actually.”
Munson has long used her installations to show the inseparability of environmental and gendered violence. Her current work is about how women are portrayed in the culture through objects. It’s very rare, she says, that those objects — clothes, beauty products, exercise gear, kitchen accoutrements, and the layers of packaging they’re sealed in — don’t contain some plastic. “If we’re being brutal to the environment, it’s also the case that we’re being brutal to people — immigrants, women, people of color,” she says.
Cultural conceptions of gender and “eco” marketing ploys have shapeshifted, perhaps becoming more insidious, since Munson first began systematizing cultural markers by color and holding them up to the masses like an unwieldy hand mirror framed in shiny plastic. But her critiques remain depressingly apt.
While her work is often loud, there’s a softer, slower side of her practice as well. In 2002, she embarked on a series of mandalas created by scanning organic ephemera. “I was first doing flowers, then moved into flowers and found creatures, like birds or different little animals,” says Munson. She likens the images to memento mori: a genre of painting that emerged in the 17th century, where images of skulls, flowers, fruit, and candles allude to the fragility of life. Originally begun in the wake of the death of a loved one, the mandala’s meaning has evolved over time, becoming, among other things, a way of memorializing birds, often killed by cars, that she picks up from the side of the road.
Whether in Catskill or Provincetown, Munson often looks to the margins where living things and their plastic doppelgängers collide. “I appreciate living in these places that have a lot of nature, but where you see the edge of nature, where it’s up against culture — the trash that is washed up on the shore, or comes down the stream, or is thrown out of the car,” she says. “I find those kinds of places inspire me to think about who we are.”