Betty Tompkins


Betty Tompkins is an American artist and arts educator. Tompkins is a painter whose works revolve, almost exclusively, around photorealistic, close-up imagery of both heterosexual and homosexual intimate acts. 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.
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. Tompkins is listed in The Brooklyn Museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art's Feminist Art Base.

Early life and education

Tompkins was born in 1945 in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Tompkins received her B.F.A. degree from Syracuse University. She took a teaching job at Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, Washington shortly after marrying her first husband, Don Tompkins. Don Tompkins had been one of her instructors at Syracuse University. She completed her graduate degree at Central Washington State College, traveling between Ellensburg and New York City.

Career

When she married her spouse he had a collection of pornography that he had ordered from Asia in order to avoid US obscenity laws in the 1950s, these images had influenced her abstraction in to the first body of work, Fuck Paintings.
In 2002, Jerry Saltz shared an image of one of Tompkins Fuck Paintings with gallery owner Michell Algus, who offered her a solo exhibition in his New York City gallery. Tompkins had not had a solo exhibition in almost 15 years and this exhibition helped restart her art career. As a result of the 2002 solo exhibition she was invited to the 7th Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon in 2003, and a year later the Centre Pompidou purchased one of her works for their permanent collection.
In 2019, Tompkins had her Instagram account deleted after she posted a photo of her Fuck Painting #1. A few months later in 2019, Instagram held a closed meeting to discuss censorship, art, and nudity on their software platform, a few artists joined the meeting including Micol Hebron, Marilyn Minter, Joanne Leah, and Siddhant Talwar. Betty Tompkins was unable to attend the meeting in-person but shared a written statement.

Work

;Fuck Paintings
Tompkins first major body of work was a series of paintings depicting a male and female figure engaging in sexual intercourse. She elected to render the images in extreme close-up, using vintage pornography stills as her source material. Rather than idealize the act of fornication, by having one body or the other exude dominance or beauty above the other, Tompkins equalizes both figures by showing only their genitalia, in congress. Tompkins' first husband possessed a collection of pornographic magazines and images, amassed since the late 1950s. The works were produced using hundreds of layers of spray paint, using a finely-calibrated airbrush to build from underdrawing to final image. These early works were made solely with black and white pigments, with extremely high contrasting tonality.
Since returning to the series in 2003, Tompkins uses a base color combination to produce a more illuminated monochrome. She originally entitled the series Joined Forms, as a more modest way of describing the imagery. She would later call the collective series Fuck Paintings. Within this first series, until 1976, Tompkins produced a sub-set of works entitled Cow Cunt Paintings.
;Censored Grids
In 1974, Tompkins was scheduled to show her work in Paris. Once her painting had arrived, French customs officials had seized it, declaring it obscene and unfit for public exhibition. It would take Tompkins nearly a year to arrange for its return. In response to this ordeal, Tompkins began to make paintings in the form of grids, where a set of white blocks with the word "censored" at the center, would block out all traces of genitalia or primary imagery in the composition. Tompkins has said she will continue to make these paintings, as there is seemingly no perceivable end to government/municipal censorship of visual art.
;WOMEN Words
In 2002 and 2013, Tompkins circulated the following email: “I am considering doing another series of pieces using images of women words. I would appreciate your help in developing the vocabulary. Please send me a list of words that describe women. They can be affectionate, pejorative, slang, descriptive, etc. The words don’t have to be in English but I need as accurate a translation as possible. Many, many thanks, Betty Tompkins.” Over 3,500 words and phrases were submitted in seven languages, equally split between men and women. In 2012, Tompkins was invited to create a performance in Vienna where 500 of the words and phrases were read aloud. Inspired by that performance, the artist then set out to create 1,000 individual word paintings, intending the series to be presented en masse once complete. On January 1, 2013, Tompkins created the first painting SLUT . In an interview with Art in America, Tompkins says, "People sent stories, too. They made comments. It was very personal. But the same four words were the most popular. Actually nothing has changed."

Public museum collections

Tompkins work is held in many public museum collections, including:
Tompkins work has been in many exhibitions, this is a select list:
YearNameTypeLocationNotes
2016Group exhibitionGavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, California and Palm Beach, Florida
2016Group exhibitionCheim & Read, New York City, New York
2016Group exhibitionFLAG Art Foundation, New York City, New York
2016Group exhibitionDallas Contemporary, Dallas, Texascurated by Alison Gingeras
2015Group exhibitionBruce High Quality Foundation, New York City, New York
2014Solo exhibition55 Gansevoort, New York City, New York
2014Group exhibitionZachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Polandcurated by Maria Brewińska in collaboration with Katarzyna Stupnicka
2014Group exhibitionGavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, California
2009–2011Group exhibitionCentre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Francecurated by Camille Morineau
2010Group exhibitionZentrum Paul Klee and the Museum of Fine Arts Bern, Bern, Switzerland
2009Group exhibitionPaul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, New Yorkcurated by Adrian Danatt and Paul Kasmin
2007La Plaisser au DessinGroup exhibitionMusée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, France
2006Group exhibitionSerpentine Galleries, London, Englandcollaboration with Trisha Donnelly, Adam Putnam, and Shannon Ebner
2004Group exhibitionCentre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
2003Group exhibition7 Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyoncurated by Bob Nickas.
2002Manhattan SkylinesGroup exhibitionMuseum of the City of New York, New York City, New York
2002Solo exhibitionMitchell Algus Gallery, New York City, New Yorkher first solo show in almost 15 years.
1992The Living Object: The Art Collection of Ellen H. Johnson,Group exhibitionAllen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio
1986–1987Group exhibitionInstitute for Women and Art at Rutgers University, New Jersey