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Museum of Sex
Address: 233 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Phone: (212) 689-6337
Working hours:
Monday: 1pm-10pm
Tuesday: CLOSED
Wednesday: 1pm-10pm
Thursday: 1pm-10pm
M-TH Last Entry: 8:40pm
Friday: 1pm-12am
Last Entry: 10pm
Saturday: 12pm-12am
Last Entry: 10pm
Sunday: 12pm-10pm
Last Entry: 8:40pm
HISTORY
The Mission of the Museum of Sex is to preserve and present the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality. The Museum produces exhibitions, publications and programs that bring the best of current scholarship to the widest possible audiences and is committed to encouraging public enlightenment, discourse and engagement.
OUR BEGINNING
When the Museum of Sex first emerged on New York City’s Fifth Avenue on October 5, 2002, it was without precedent in the museum world. In the development of its inaugural award winning exhibition NYCSEX: How New York Transformed Sex in America, the Museum created a board of advisors comprised of leading scholars and historians. The Museum’s advisory board has guided curators and guest curators towards research resources, pertinent collections and exhibition relevant artists. Advisors such as Steven Heller, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Ph.D., Mike Wallace, Ph.D., and June M. Reinisch, Director Emeritus for The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction as well as institutional collaborations with New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, New-York Historical Society and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum have contributed to making the Museum of Sex one of the most dynamic and innovative institutions in the world.
Design has played a pivotal role in both exhibition development and execution, with world-renowned design firms such as Pentagram Design Inc., Casson Mann and 2×4, helping to transform the galleries and historic building over the last six years. The museum’s building, built in the area of New York formerly known as the “Tenderloin,” a district of NYC made notorious by the 19th century for its bordellos, dance halls, theaters and saloons, serves as a New York City land marked site.
OUR WORK
Since its inception, the Museum of Sex has generated over 30 exhibitions and 6 virtual installations, each in keeping with the Museum’s mission of advocating open discourse surrounding sex and sexuality as well as striving to present to the public the best in current scholarship unhindered by self-censorship. With each new exhibition, lecture series, event and publication, the Museum of Sex is committed to addressing a wide range of topics, while simultaneously highlighting material and artifacts from different continents, cultures, time periods and media.
OUR COLLECTION
The Museum’s permanent collection of over 20,000 artifacts is comprised of works of art, photography, clothing and costumes, technological inventions and historical ephemera. Additionally, the museum houses both a research library as well as an extensive multimedia library, which includes 8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm, BETA, VHS and DVDs. From fine art to historical ephemera to film, the Museum of Sex preserves an ever-growing collection of sexually related objects that would otherwise be destroyed and discarded due to their sexual content.
OUR PUBLIC
In a short time, the Museum has received attention from academic institutions, major publications, media outlets, and celebrities, positioning the Museum of Sex within the realm of academia and pop culture alike. The Museum has been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire and Time and on television broadcasts ranging from CNN to IFC to NBC’s Law & Order Criminal Intent. Award-winning advertising campaigns in print and television media have sealed the Museum’s arrival as a cultural touchstone.
Accolades continue to pour in from visitors and the press in every corner of the world, inspiring the Museum of Sex to continually surpass its own high expectations. Future planned exhibitions and events – the likes of which have never ever been offered by any other institution- are guaranteed to captivate and resonate, securing the Museum of Sex a well-deserved, distinguished place in history.
LETTER FROM THE FOUNDER
By Daniel Gluck, Executive Director and Founder of the Museum of Sex
This is not the first Museum of Sex. Some might say that distinction goes to the Museo Borbonico, created near Naples in the mid-18th century to house frescoes newly unearthed in Pompeii- those sexually explicit scenes were locked in a special room that only gentlemen were allowed to enter. But I prefer to credit the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) founded in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld, an energetic physician who was among the pioneers of the study of human sexuality. While more concerned with research than exhibitions for the general public, the Institute collected and displayed fine art, and assembled thousands of photographs, books and manuscripts in its remarkable library. The Institute’s collections were lost on May 6, 1933, when a mob of Nazi “students” ransacked the building in central Berlin, burning the contents of its library in a public square four days later. Speculating as to why the Institute was a target for the Nazis just three months after Hitler came to power, one former employee said that anti-Semitism obviously played a part, but also noted that many Nazi officials had been Hirschfeld’s patients and wanted to destroy evidence of their homosexuality.
Unable to return to Germany from a worldwide lecture tour, Hirschfeld died in Nice, France in 1935. But his vision of creating institutions dedicated to the inquiry about sex and sexuality survived, and found a safer haven in the United States. In this nation of presumed Puritans, Alfred C. Kinsey would develop an institute that carried Hirschfeld’s mission, William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson would investigate the physiology of sexual activity and, following the social upheavals of feminism and gay and lesbian rights, universities would soon offer courses in women’s history and queer studies. And while Americans have become increasingly sophisticated in their understanding of sex, there has not yet been an institution in this country dedicated to bringing the serious study of sex and sexuality to a popular audience. Until now.
Following in the lineage of our distinguished predecessors, The Museum of Sex will produce exhibitions, publications and programs that bring the best of current scholarship on sex and sexuality to the widest possible audiences. The Museum’s inaugural exhibition NYC Sex appropriately focuses on the social history of a city that has been the hub of activities and ideas which have changed how Americans think about sex. In most respects, this can be attributed to the qualities that have made the city so influential in other arenas. Since its founding as a Dutch company town in 1626, New York has attracted generations of opportunists, con artists, fanatics, dreamers, and adventurers. Over the course of its history, this port city has anchored the greatest commercial and cultural expansion the world has ever known, and became home to millions of the world’s “homeless and tempest-tossed.” New York has tended to favor innovation, and learned to tolerate difference.
The sexual diversity of New York has come at a high personal and legal cost to many. The city’s sexual freedoms were won in courts, in the media, in the clash of politics, religious beliefs and competing cultures. But “only in New York,” as the expression goes, could this particular Museum of Sex been born- in a city bold enough, bad enough, bizarre enough and brazen enough to have a sexual history unlike that of any other city, and with the financial and media platform that made this history known and relevant far beyond the boundaries of the five boroughs. In investigating this history, we draw inspiration from those who have struggled in New York – whether as activists or hucksters, intellectuals or entrepreneurs, leaders or lovers – to transform sex in America.
Information and photos taken from the site: www.museumofsex.com