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Today’s Times Square offers giant screens, Broadway marquees and plenty of places to buy a souvenir sweatshirt. But a new exhibition is looking back at a very different attraction: the sex clubs, peep shows and adult theaters that once crowded the neighborhood.
Live Sex Acts opens Friday, September 18, at Times Square Space, bringing together photographs and artworks by Vivienne Maricevic, Scott Ewalt and Alix Vernet. Despite its name, the show features no live performances. It’s an 18-and-over exhibition about the adult venues that flourished from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s—and what happened when they disappeared.
More than 65 photographs by Maricevic take visitors inside clubs and theaters, including Show World, the Pussycat, the Ramrod and the Unicorn. She gained access to backrooms through relationships with the people who worked there, and, according to the exhibition organizers, everyone she photographed consented. The pictures offer something more personal than the usual tale of old Times Square as a place everyone hurried through with their eyes down.
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Ewalt, meanwhile, saved signs, posters and other memorabilia as adult venues were torn down beginning in the late 1980s. His work draws on that disappearing streetscape and on the artists and publishers who made a home in its businesses. Vernet approaches the history through what’s left behind: cast pieces of a demolished peep show’s awning, a slide of the building and recreated neon. Together, the three artists give visitors a look at a neighborhood whose traces are now much harder to spot than its billboards.
The exhibition also asks what those spaces meant to the people who used them: its organizers describe clubs and darkened theaters as places where queer New Yorkers could gather beyond the scrutiny of mainstream culture and where sexuality, art and activism sometimes met. The venues sold sex, but they also held communities and creative work that couldn’t easily find room elsewhere.
For a closer look at that era, Maricevic and Ewalt will speak at the Printed Matter Book Fair at MoMA PS1 on Saturday, September 26, at 3 pm, alongside the publication of New York Then.
Live Sex Acts runs through November 15 and is open Thursday through Saturday from noon to 6 pm or by appointment. The opening event takes place September 18 from 6 to 9 pm. Expect explicit imagery and mature themes; admission is restricted to visitors 18 and older.