PARTICIPANT INC is proud to present Ephemera Office Enterprises: Martin Wong, the first in a series of exhibitions that reflect on the ephemeral as both material and existence — presenting rarely seen work of documentation and process integral to alternative art practices. Showing ephemeral material culled from the Martin Wong Papers at the Fales Library and Special Collections and a multi-panel work, Mintaka, from The Estate of Martin Wong, P.P.O.W, the presentation aims to address Wong's fascination with prisons, and more generally represent the scope of Wong’s practice related and directly influenced by the artist’s residence on the Lower East Side. The selection of source material — newspaper clippings, Time and Newsweek features on state penitentiaries, the artist’s book collection on prisons, and personal photographs of lovers, friends, and prisons toured by the artist — in many ways, point to the composition of Mintaka. Known to faithfully and imaginatively chronicle his passions, the work is imbued with a subject within a subject motif. Accentuating a mode of multiplicity, the combined picture planes depict a three-way between men differentiated by race and positioned beneath Wong’s signature code of communication, his constellations.

The year Wong painted Mintaka, a bulletin by the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported data on the Nation's prisoners stating, “the 1990 increase of nearly 59,000 prisoners equals a demand for approximately 1,100 new prison beds per week nationwide. Prisons were estimated to be operating from 18% to 29% above their capacities at yearend.” Revealing a complexity of imposed intimacy and policed desire constituted by an oppressive system that now incarcerates racial minorities at six times the rate of whites, Wong probes a resistance in form of desire. Portraits of lovers taken in his apartment at his beloved Loisaida likened to images of prisoners, reclaim both subjectivity and promiscuity as famously propositioned by Douglas Crimp in his 1987 text, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” at a time when multiplicity of pleasure equaled being.

In conjunction with Martin Wong: Human Instamatic at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Nov 4, 2015 – Mar 13, 2016, curated by Sergio Bessa and Yasmin Ramirez.