Meet the Artists: Session 2
Marcos Castro, Naima Green, and Portia Munson
Marcos, Naima, and Portia will be in residence at Fountainhead from February 19 to March 19, 2025. Their residency programs are sponsored in part by Jane Wesman and Don Savelson.
Marcos Castro
Marcos Castro's practice is influenced by the Mexican graphic and muralist tradition, neo-Expressionism, neo-Mexicanism, and a contemporary gothic or punk aesthetic. He has developed a personal symbolic language centered around an animalistic imaginary, hybrid beings, and a re-reading of Mexican foundational myths.
By deconstructing patriotic symbols and reinterpreting historical events, Castro conveys his vision of contemporaneity and incites viewers to question official historical narratives. His work reflects a fragmented Mexican identity, using symbolic elements and aesthetic codes to construct a new narrative. Castro positions himself as a witness of his time, advocating a revolution of thought that challenges the established order and deep-rooted myths.
His work has been acquired by the JUMEX Foundation Collection, Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Museo Amparo, Fundación Alumnos 47, Perez Art Museum and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. Castro lives and works in Mexico City, where he is a founding member and co-director of the cultural space Obrera Centro.
Naima Green
Naima Green is an artist, photographer, educator, and sensualist who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. Her work accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition to frame archival research and picture-making as a continuum. Her still images are kinetic, living histories. Her current series, I Keep Missing My Water, is a lens-based project that, at its core, is about portraiture as a radical experimentation on what it means to image someone. Through fragmentation as one mode, the images create intimate interventions within natural landscapes. The work centers figures in lush, drenched, watery environments as sites of leisure, transformation, pleasure, and play. As a mirror of queer life, the sea becomes a site of grounding, regeneration, and potentiality.
Green’s recent and upcoming solo exhibitions includes shows at the International Center of Photography, Fotografiska, and Baxter St CCNY. Green is currently based in New York.
Portia Munson
Portia Munson is a feminist and environmental artist creating installations, paintings, and sculptures that reveal and question the meanings embedded in the mass-produced items of our culture. Her work is inspired directly from her everyday experiences, focusing on the clash between our materialistic culture and the "natural" world - what is acquired, consumed and thrown away. Both the subject matter and material of Munson’s work are castoffs, collected from yard sales and thrift shops, trash from along roadsides and streams, give-away piles, beaches and transfer stations. She amasses and categorizes thousands of these found objects, then assembles them into densely layered works that emphasize the objects' color, ubiquity and intended function.
Within the last ten years, Munson’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Museum of Sex, NYC; P·P·O·W, NYC; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Newmark Gallery at Art Omi, Ghent, NY; Rockefeller Center, New York, NY; Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA; Disjecta, Portland, OR; NYU Langone Medical Center Gallery, NYC, and Millks Gallery at Central College, Pella, IA; among others. Munson currently resides in the Hudson Valley area of New York.
