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We introduce with pleasure what we believe will be America's most exciting new museum! The Museum of Sex (MoSex) will finally give honor and dignity to a traditionally taboo subject that has too often been trivialized or defamed by proponents and opponents alike.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, grand museums were built as shrines to nature, art, history, technology, medicine--even sports and rock 'n' roll. Yet we still lack a major public forum dedicated to one of humanity's most crucial and elemental driving forces--sex. At the dawn of the new millennium, the time is right for the inauguration of a pioneering sex center that will offer education as well as entertainment. We believe there is enormous promise in the complex schedule of programs currently being assembled by our in-house staff and top-flight board of advisors representing the full spectrum of the arts, humanities, sciences, and medicine. The distinction and originality of the Museum of Sex project are shown by it's already having won the 1999 Progressive Architecture award from Architecture Magazine, whose April issue featured the design for our building renovation at 5th Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan. We believe our Manhattan site is well on its way to achieving landmark status. Our first major permanent exhibition, Sex in America: From Puritans to Cybersex, will be mounted in the spring of 2000. This comprehensive study of America's rich and conflicted sexual history will extend from the pre-Columbian period to the turn of the millennium and beyond. Utilizing art and artifacts, photography and films, and music and performance as well as interactive installations supplemented by archival texts, Sex in America will form the core of the Museum of Sex's program of exhibitions. Other exhibitions in development are Cagey City: A History of Sex in New York City (focused on 42nd Street and Times Square), our first on-line web exhibit Lawful Sex: The Evolution of Obscenity Law and Sexual Freedom in the US 1700-2000, and Future Sex, exploring sex in the age of information and technology. A series of supporting documentary films on sex and culture is also being planned. Finally, we intend to launch a systematic inquiry into identifying and releasing for public view the wealth of sexually oriented art and artifacts (from antiquity to Victorian times) that are currently under lock and key in museums around the world--secret collections that heretofore only a few privileged scholars have had access to. Ideologically, the Museum of Sex intends to respect all attitudes toward sex in society. Our exhibitions and projects will take a stance of scholarly neutrality toward heated sexual controversies. We want the largest possible audience and will not limit our dialogue on sex to the entrenched political or moral positions of the left or the right. We are delighted that the public response to the Museum of Sex has thus far been extremely positive. Please join the effort to bring this truly stimulating cultural center to life. Make time for MoSex!
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