Vintage vibrators and mermaids in a tank: New York’s Museum of Sex to open in Miami
Like everybody and everything else in New York, The Museum of Sex is coming to Miami.
The museum, which is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of the history of human sexuality, is expanding for the first time outside its home turf and will be opening a second location in the Allapattah warehouse district in the spring of 2023.
Daniel Gluck, executive director and founder of the museum, said that Miami’s reputation as an international magnet for art and culture, solidified by events like Art Basel and Miami Art Week, drew the museum’s attention.
“It’s the next ideal step for us, to expand the museum to other markets in the U.S. and globally,” he said. “Miami seemed like a perfect location, primarily because it has become an art center in America and the world. We love Miami, the culture, the diversity, the energy. It just hits all the marks.”
Founded in 2002, the original museum has highlighted more than 40 exhibitions over the years, balancing serious academic, scholarly and scientific studies with playful eroticism. It features fine art and has displayed more than 20,000 sexually significant artifacts from around the world.
At around 32,000 square feet, the new museum, now under construction at 2200 NW 24th Ave., is bigger than its New York sibling, which is near Madison Square Park and about 20,000 square feet (and being expanded upward to 25,000 because land is hard to come by in NYC).
The Miami museum will feature three large exhibition galleries as well as retail space and a bar.
The inaugural exhibitions will include “Hajime Sorayama: Desire Machines,” featuring work by the Japanese illustrator best known for his depiction of erotic female robots. This will be his first major solo museum exhibit in the U.S. and will feature four of his “sexy robot” sculptures, which are over nine feet tall, plus 20 erotic paintings that have never been displayed before.
Also on display will be the historical survey “Modern Sex: 100 Years of Design and Decency,” which examines the impact of restrictions on design, marketing and distribution of sexual health products from the 1920s through today. The exhibit will include more than 500 artifacts, historical media and medical objects (like the “cure-all” vintage vibrator of the 1950s).
The museum will also be home to a new version of its permanent installation “Super Funland: Journey Into the Erotic Carnival,” a playful immersive experience that explores the erotic roots and sexually-based thrills of the carnival. The installation, which was launched in New York in 2019, is made up of about 20 performances, games and amusements, built around the centerpiece of a 40-foot-wide rococo mermaid tank that acts as a performance space.
The installation has historical significance, Gluck said, but it’s also just plain fun.
“Carnivals date back to the Roman Bacchanal,” he said. “Carnivals have always had that licentious undertone, even in early 20th century America. Before Six Flags took over the model, they had a very interesting, seedy, erotic underbelly.”
While the museum is dedicated to highlighting what Gluck calls high and low art, it also performs a valuable service that’s not being replicated on a large scale, Gluck said. Even the far smaller Wilzig Erotic Art Museum in Miami Beach focuses solely on art, not history or science.
“Museums are important spaces to preserve and celebrate and to build public awareness of culture, whether it’s art or music or science,” he said. “They function as a space you can go to and be exposed to a genre or subsection of culture. There’s a very significant role sexuality plays in our culture. We think we’re important. We have a story to tell. And we’re super happy to be in Miami.”
This story was originally published December 14, 2022 at 9:00 AM.