It’s a match made in sex-obsessed heaven: the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation has given 30 of the late photographer’s prints to the Kinsey Institute, reports Art in America. The Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University in Bloomington, founded by sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, will receive some of Mapplethorpe’s more controversial images, taken of members of the S&M community in New York in the ’70s and ’80s.
The donation is a fitting pairing, of course: both men ignited controversy in their day over their frank depictions and discussions of sex. An exhibition of works from Mapplethorpe’s explicit “X Portfolio,” which depicts male couples embracing and nude black men with erections, was canceled before it even reached the Corcoran in Washington in 1989, A.i.A. reminds us.
At the moment, the prints are only accessible to those with purely “academic” concerns — researchers and scholars must view them by appointment. The institute is planning a public exhibition of the photographs at some point in the future. [Art in America]
— Julia Halperin
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