"Visitor Discretion is Advised"

Combining SEX with "Visitor Discretion is Advised" usually gets people's attention. I'm glad I saw this provocative show at Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery today. You can see more about these audacious artists at http://news.haverford.edu/blogs/sexdrive.

I was especially glad that there was a powerful 4 x 6 foot piece by David Wojnarowicz, in light of his recent censorship by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. As the curator of SEX DRIVE, Stuart Horodner, notes "its inclusion aligns the exhibition with the many arts professionals, institutions, and funding agencies who issued swift and strong responses denouncing the Smithsonian's troubling curatorial decision."  He is being both professional and polite to call their decision merely 'troubling.'

Here's their blurb:
Sex Drive presents contemporary artworks that address sexuality across a panoply of forms. Using photography, drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and installation, 22 artists bring their own pleasures and political dispositions to bear on identity and gender, romance and lust, religious and legal strictures, and private and public scandals. Sex Drive asks us to consider the conventions that govern sexuality, as well as its unruly power.

Stuart Horodner, artistic director of the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, developed the exhibition in conjunction with the Haverford College humanities seminar, “Sex, State, and Society in the Early Modern World,” which offers an historical perspective for understanding why sex and sexuality remain such volatile issues in contemporary politics around the globe.