Portia Munson The Artist Who Displays Hoarded Collections As Art
Juliet LOVES pink. So it is with great amusement and girly fun that she and I have explored a pink pop-up, and a pink restaurant in NYC. Recently, the Flag Art Foundation featured Portia Munson’s “Pink Project” and so off we went, (her dressed in pink of course) to explore and see it for ourselves.
The exhibit explored artworks that array ordinary objects within containers, a theme that artist, Portia Munson readily played with. In the past, we had seen her pink objects exhibited in a glass coffin and also perfectly lined up on a pink table, OCD style. This time though, her exhibitting format took over a room. A pink bedroom! Juliet could not have been more thrilled looking around at all the pink gloriousness.
She brought her Barbie doll (also dressed in pink for the occasion) and showed her around. Out loud, she dreamed of living there and said, “Mommy, I wanna live here.” Here she is after I explained she couldn’t.
haha! We stayed in this room, playing I spy for quite some time. It was the girliest sensory overload one could imagine. thousands of discarded pink objects ranging from toys, to fashions, to stuffed animals and shoes, filled every crevice, every corner.
It was truly amazing to see! The canopy for this pink bedroom was made up of pink children’s onesies of all kinds which made me wonder how many items of pink clothing Juliet has gone through at the ripe old age of 5.
The artist actually sewed all of these clothes to create this tented effect.
From reading about Portia’s passion for pink, I understood that she was exploring the marketing of femininity and questioning how culturally loaded the color was.
Leaving the exhibit, I started questioning where the line between hoarding and collecting for art’s sake was drawn.
Check out her last NYC exhibit called, “The Garden” below.
What do you think? Is this hoarding or art?
