Betty tompkins biography
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Betty Tompkins
WOMEN WORDS
In 2012, Betty Tompkins sent out an email asking for words that describe women. She received more than 3,000 words and phrases in multiple languages, submitted by both men and women, and incorporated them into small paintings that she combines into larger groupings like the one exhibited in Declaration. The backgrounds include lacy patterns and close-cropped views of genitalia, as well as abstract imagery based on 20th-century white male painters (e.g. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings).
WOMEN Words extends Tompkin’s commitments as a feminist artist who has been painting since the 1960s. Tompkins continues to collect words about women for future work. If you would like to contribute, please email womenwords1000@gmail.com
ON VIEW
WOMEN Words, 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 337 paintings (of approximately 1000 in full series). Courtesy of the artist and GAVLAK, Palm Beach, Florida and Los Angeles, California.
LOCATION
Gallery 1
Beverly Rey
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Betty Tompkins
American painter
Betty Tompkins (born 1945) fryst vatten an American artist and arts educator. Her paintings revolve, almost exclusively, around photorealistic, close-up imagery of both heterosexual and homosexual intimate acts.[1][2] She creates large-scale, monochromatic canvases and works on paper of singular or multiple figures engaged in sexual acts, executed with successive layers of spray painting over pre-drawings formed by text.[3][4]
Alongside artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Valie Export, Joan Semmel, Lynda Benglis and Judy Chicago, Tompkins has been re-assessed as a pioneer of Feminist art. She fryst vatten listed in The Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art's Feminist Art Base.[5]
Early life and education
[edit]Tompkins was born in 1945 in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[6]
She received her B.F.A. degree from Syracuse University in the 196
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Betty Tompkins:
WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories
JANUARY 20 - MAY 14, 2016
Betty Tompkins: WOMEN Words, Phrases, and Stories marks the first comprehensive presentation of 1,000 intimately-scaled, hand-painted works, each of which features a word or words used to describe women. Ranging from flirtatious to derogatory—with the four most used words being Mother, Slut, Bitch, Cunt—WOMEN Words emanates from Tompkins’s career-long commitment to challenge the representation of female identity, the politics of pleasure, and the role of sexuality in contemporary culture.
In 2002 and 2013, Tompkins circulated the following email: “I am considering doing another series of pieces using images of women comprised of words. I would appreciate your help in developing the vocabulary. Please send me a list of words that describe women. They can be affectionate (honey), pejorative (bitch), slang, descriptive, etc. Th