At Residence 11, we want to bring you the latest news about erotic art. Here are 3 exhibits of art dealing with sex and sexuality in various ways you don’t want to miss; the first two close on Friday so if you’re nearby, check them out and tell your art-loving friends. Click on each exhibit’s title for hours and more details. Know of a cool erotic art event happening? Let us know at editorial@residence11.com
Radical Desire: Making On Our Backs Magazine, through September 30, Cornell, New York
On Our Backs magazine launched in San Francisco in 1984 promising, per the tagline on the cover, “entertainment for the adventurous lesbian.” The photographic images on the cover and throughout were central to its mandate to deliver sexual content for lesbians. The photography also created the greatest difficulties for the magazine’s circulation at a moment when many feminist leaders decried pornographic photographs and film as a form of violence against women. This exhibition presents original photographs created for On Our Backs during its first decade. Made by staffers and freelancers, professionals and amateurs, members of the magazine’s inner circle and its far-flung readership, they convey the fantasies, imagination, humor, rigor, radicalism, political engagement, and ethos of community-building and inclusion that defined On Our Backs and made it a touchstone in the queer press. Additional photographs and documents elucidate the political and erotic contexts into which the magazine emerged, the women behind it, and their business practices and strategies. All materials are drawn from Cornell Library’s Human Sexuality Collection.
This exhibition was curated by Kate Addleman-Frankel, the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography at the Johnson, and Brenda J. Marston, Curator of the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library.
Presented in conjunction with two companion exhibitions: Berenice Abbott: Portraits of Women, 1925–1930 at the Johnson Museum of Art and Jessica Tanzer’s San Francisco, 1987-1996 in Kroch Library’s Sillerman ’68 Rotunda.
Kroch Library, Hirshland Gallery, Cornell University, Cornell, New York
Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art, through September 30, New York City
The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is delighted to announce Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art. Curated by Mariano López Seoane and Bernardo Mosqueira, Eros Rising presents drawings, paintings, and photographs by Artur Barrio, Oscar Bony, Carmelo Carrá, Feliciano Centurión, David Lamelas, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Carlos Motta, Wynnie Mynerva, La Chola Poblete, and Tadáskía that seek to give form to the intangible experience of eroticism.
Inspired by a series of pastel drawings by David Lamelas (b. 1946, Argentina) from 2014–2015, Eros Rising explores how artists have subverted conventional representations of sex—often based in the objectification and categorization of the body—to instead convey the myriad sensations bound up in erotic encounters. The featured artists reimagine sensuality in surreal representations that question the limits between the real and the fictitious, decentering the body by fragmenting it or displacing it altogether.
Viewed collectively, these works challenge codified expressions of sensuality and static definitions of the human to envision the body as radically open. Encompassing a broad range of perspectives and styles, Eros Rising presents a cross-section of intergenerational artists who have contested the restrictive boundaries of identification, grasping for more fluid and expansive conceptions of the self and the erotic.
In Lamelas’s works, human forms are evoked through celestial phenomena—a rising sun or a flowing meteor shower—that find the mundane in the cosmic. Drawings by Artur Barrio (b. 1945, Portugal), Tadáskía (b. 1993, Brazil), and Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (b. 1996, Brazil) similarly propose other ways of imagining the body and the surrounding landscape, dissolving the barrier between the self and the outside world. Meanwhile, Feliciano Centurión (1962–1996, Paraguay) and La Chola Poblete (b. 1989, Argentina) tease out mythological references from ancient Greece and Andean lore to approximate the otherworldliness of desire.
While many of these works approach the languages of abstraction, others rethink the canon of figuration by transforming the body. An untitled 1968 drawing by Carmelo Carrá (b. 1945, Italy) fractures the human form through the broken outline, while the large watercolor Formas de alargar un pene (2021) by Wynnie Mynerva (b. 1993, Peru) elongates and warps the phallus. The body becomes grotesque in a small ink drawing by Carlos Motta (b. 1978, Colombia), from his series We The Enemy (2019), which reflects on the designation of certain sexual identities as “deviant” or “perverse” in Christian traditions. Two photographs by Oscar Bony (1941–2002, Argentina), which were censored for their erotic content when they were first displayed in Argentina in 1976, similarly depict the body in segments, zooming in on two bright red, intertwining tongues.
Eros Rising will be accompanied by a booklet featuring an essay by the exhibition’s curators, Mariano López Seoane and Bernardo Mosqueira.
ISLAA, 50 E 78th St., New York, New York
Men in Rope Exhibit by Midori, through October 30, San Francisco
Kink Trailblazer and Genre defying Artist, Midori, Explores the Mythic and Masculine in her latest San Francisco photography and rope exhibition:
Men In Rope – at The Arbor – Madison Young’s NEW Queer Art Gallery & Film Screening Room
Midori’s dramatic photographic images are the result of her collaborations with queer and gay men in the aughts. She worked with her photographic subjects to bring forth fantasies and narratives that made them the heroes (or villains) of their own stories, saying “I wanted to put dreams into form. I was both the interpreter and witness.”
These fantastical photographic narratives fill the walls of the gallery, windows into the masculine and mythic, hinting at stories bigger than our own
From the artist’s notes: “I wanted to collaborate with queer and gay men, to create dramatic images of them as heroes (or villains) of their own epic stories.”
The Arbor Gallery, 465 S. Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, New York