The Women in My Life was the first major retrospective of Betty Tompkins’s paintings and drawings. Held in collaboration with Monmouth University, the retrospective was displayed at 800 Gallery in West Long Branch, NJ in October of 1997. Tompkins’s colorful, paint-heavy paintings display brushstrokes and blendy just as boldy as they display the female body. Tompkins’s subjects are Greek goddesses and female bodybuilders in various states of disfigurement and decay: they crumble under a swan’s gaze, are caught in a cowboy’s lariat or are grafted with the head of collie. Opposing these dreamy, tactile paintings are Tompkins’s hyperrealistic Fuck Drawings and her infamous Cow/Cunt Drawing, in which a cow serenely grazes on a field of pubic hair atop a grisaille vagina. The catalogue includes an essay by Bill Arning.