Established American artist, Portia Munson, has had an over 30 year long career marked by feminist assemblage pieces. This means each work she creates goes through a rigorous and extensive object collection process, all of which will then be arranged together to create one final piece like a 3D collage. Munson also purposefully collects pieces from everyday life in order to investigate how the patriarchy permeates every single aspect of daily life for ordinary citizens. Which is why now, in light of the recent election of President Trump which comes with concerns on major drawbacks of women’s rights, one of Munson’s pieces, Bound Angel, has been installed at the 2024 Art Basel Miami. Which is why the piece, along with Munson’s body of work, is relevant to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal of Gender Equality.
Following other pieces in Munson’s oeuvre where a single colour would dominate the entire assemblage, Bound Angel is dominated by the colour white. The piece is arranged on a long dining table with numerous vintage porcelain angel lights placed on top like a strange banquet. In an interview with Art Basel, Munson shared how she was particularly interested in how these vintage lamps were often found sold or stored with their electric cords wound around their bodies, as if it were a rope binding the angels in place.
In a statement to Colossal Magazine, Munson shares how the presence of these cords help the piece to “explore how femininity and the female body are portrayed in our culture.” The fact that they are all porcelain angels also helps people to visualize how the patriarchy constricts femme rights, often pacifying, sexualizing and even infantilizing them. Another striking feature that Munson has observed from the assemblage is the fact that all the angels are depicted as White femmes. “‘They were Caucasian, young, “pretty”... there was something about them that seemed sinister, as if they represented the ideal,” said Munson.
Here, Bound Angel alludes to a need for intersectional feminism. This contemporary branch of feminism recognizes that aside from gender, inequality between human beings is further afflicted by other parts of a person’s identity, such as race, religion and more. As Munson has pointed out, a key part of intersectional feminism is the fact that white femmes are most likely to be put ahead of femmes of colour when it comes to acquiring equality. One example of this is how race would more often than not worsen the gender pay gap. The Center for American Progress has found that while White cis-women earn 83 cents for every dollar that a cis-man earns, Black women earn only 64 cents and Hispanic women earn a meager 57 cents.
Portia Munson’s Bound Angel is a poignant exploration of how the patriarchy constrains femme people, by visually representing it through a striking assemblage of vintage porcelain angel lamps bound by electric cords. The dominance of white angels in the piece also underscores the exclusionary nature of traditional feminism, calling for a more intersectional approach that addresses the compounded inequalities faced by femmes of color. Installed at the 2024 Art Basel Miami, Bound Angel serves as both a reflection of contemporary feminist struggles and a rallying cry for the advancement of gender equality in all its dimensions.
Find out more about Bound Angel and other pieces by Portia Munson on her website www.portiamunson.com or Instagram @portiamunson.