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, 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
The Museum of Sex has curated more than 50 exhibitions that delve into the diverse realms of human sexuality within the realms of arts, sciences, and culture. Our commitment is to foster an environment that promotes open dialogue, free from the constraints of self-censorship. Beyond exhibitions, we have curated lecture series, events, and digital content, as well as publications, all dedicated to engaging with a broad spectrum of topics related to sexuality.
Our Collection
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.
Click here to read a letter from our founder.
Ruth Abram
Former president and founder, lower east side tenement museum, New York, NY
Since its inception, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has gained recognition as an authoritative voice on immigrant experiences on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Ruth Abram is currently organizing the Coalition of International Site Museums of Conscience, which presently includes as its members The Gulag Museum in Russia, The Famine Museum in Ireland, The Goree Slave House in Senegal, The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, and Terezin Camp in the Czech Republic.
GEORGE CHAUNCEY, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Dr. Chauncey’s research and lectures focus on urbanism, gender, sexuality, subjectivity and social movements in twentieth-century United States. He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and Merle Curti Social History Award from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. He is currently working on The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Stonewall Era. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1989.
PATRICIA CLINE COHEN, PH.D.
PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Dr. Cohen specializes in 19th century American social and women’s history. Her publications include The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York and A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America. She has recently received fellowships from the University of California and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She received her B.A. from the University of Bristol (UK) in 1968 and her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1977.
BETTY DODSON, PH.D.
ARTIST, AUTHOR AND SEX EDUCATOR
Betty Dodson achieved international recognition with several ground-breaking erotic art exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s before leaving the art world to become a feminist sex teacher. She designed and facilitated workshops that taught masturbation skills so women could explore their own sexual pleasure. In 1974 she self-published her first book, Liberating Masturbation. Her book Sex for One was published in 1986, and became a Paperback Classic when it was revised in 1996. She received a Ph.D. in sexology in 1992 and has produced three videotapes that document her pioneering teaching methods. Dr. Dodson has a private practice in New York City and maintains an active website, bettydodson.com.
TIMOTHY J. GILFOYLE, PH.D.
PROFESSOR AND FORMER CHAIR OF HISTORY, LOYOLA UNIVERSITY, CHICAGO
Dr. Gilfoyle teaches American urban and social history. He is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920 which was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians. He has been a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, a Senior Fellow at the Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution and a N.E.H./Lloyd Lewis Fellow at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Gilfoyle received both his B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1979 and 1987, respectively.
JOAN NESTLE
CO-FOUNDER, LESBIAN HERSTORY ARCHIVES (1973)
Ms. Nestle housed the Lesbian Herstory Archives in her Upper West Side apartment for the first twenty years of its existence. She is the author of A Restricted Country and A Fragile Union, editor of the anthology Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, and co-editor of five other books. She taught writing in the SEEK program of Queens College for twenty-nine years, until cancer forced her to retire in 1995.
JUNE M. REINISCH, PH.D.
DIRECTOR EMERITUS, THE KINSEY INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN SEX, GENDER AND REPRODUCTION
Dr. Reinisch served as director of The Kinsey Institute and professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Indiana University from 1982-1993. Upon retirement, she was named Director Emeritus and a member of The Kinsey Institute Board of Trustees. She is now President of R2 Science Communications, Inc., consulting to business, media, academia and the legal profession. Her public education publications include the thrice-weekly newspaper column The Kinsey Report, syndicated internationally for nine years by United Feature/United Media; and The Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex.
ANNIE SPRINKLE, PH.D.
PERFORMANCE ARTIST, ACTIVIST
Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D. is the prostitute/porn star turned performance artist/sexologist. She has passionately explored sexuality for thirty years, all the while sharing her experiences through mutli-media; making her own unique brand of feminist sex films, writing books and articles, theater performances and teaching. Annie has consistently championed sex worker rights and health care. She is the first porn star to earn her Ph.D., which is in Human Sexuality. Annie is presently a popular college lecturer. Her first book, Post Porn Modernist is a sex book classic, and her book, Hardcore from the Heart won the Firecracker Award for best sex book of the year. She was the subject of four segments on HBO’s Real Sex.
MICHAEL SAPPOL, PH.D.
CURATOR-HISTORIAN, THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
Dr. Sappol’s specialty is the history of the body, medicine, science and sexuality. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America. His dissertation, which was an earlier version of the book, made him a finalist for the Bancroft Dissertation Award and a winner of the Whiting Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Award. He holds a Ph.D. in American history from Columbia University.
ANDREA TONE, PH.D.
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, GEORGIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Andrea Tone is a specialist in U.S. social, industrial and gender history. Her publications include Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America, The Business of Benevolence: Industrial Paternalism in Progressive America and Controlling Reproduction: An American History, which she edited. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University in 1992.
LUC SANTE
VISITING PROFESSOR OF WRITING AND PHOTOGRAPHY, BARD COLLEGE
Mr. Sante is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and Bookforum. He is the author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, Evidence, The Factory of Facts and Walker Evans. He has received a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Grammy, for album notes. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he attended, but did not graduate from, Columbia College.
Louis K. Meisel Gallery and Charles G. Martignette
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Michigan State University Libraries
Municipal Archives of the City of New York
Museum of the City of New York
Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia
National Fairground and Circus Archive
New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality
Peter Norton Foundation
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
Richard Roseblum Family Foundation
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College
Seymour B. Durst Old York Library, the Graduate Center of the City University
Staten Island Historical Society
The Muse Foundation of New York is a fully registered private foundation affiliated with The Museum of Sex. Its mission is to work with The Museum of Sex to preserve and make available a comprehensive collection of materials relating to the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality.
The Muse Foundation is gratefully accepting donations of the following:
- Art and Artifacts
- Resource Materials
- Equipment and Services
Contributions to the Muse Foundation are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.
For more information please contact collections@museumofsex.com.
Corporate Membership
Donations
The Foundation:
The Muse Foundation of New York is a fully registered private foundation affiliated with The Museum of Sex. Its mission is to work with The Museum of Sex to preserve and make available a comprehensive collection of materials relating to the history, evolution and cultural significance of human sexuality.
Submission:
Before submitting for consideration the Foundation will require the following on the intended donation:
- A photograph of the artifact/s, digital image or detailed inventoried description of the artifact/s (Digital files are preferred.)
- All available information on the history and provenance of the artifact/s
- Potential donor’s name, address and phone number
The MuSe Foundation and the Museum of Sex at no time will make available your personal information to any third party; your personal information will remain confidential between you and The Museum of Sex and the MuSe Foundation. We may disclose personal information only if required to do so by law or that such action is necessary to (a) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on us; (b) protect and defend our rights or property or those of our visitors, and (c) act as immediately necessary in order to protect the personal safety of our visitors or the general public.
The donor will be responsible for transporting the artifact to the museum.
Please send all donation information to:
DONATION OFFER
233 5th Avenue, Suite 3B
NewYork, NY 10016
Email- collections@museumofsex.com
Donation offers are reviewed as they are received.
Due to the high volume of material submitted for review we are not always able to respond to everyone or to meet personally to review all portfolios. We appreciate your understanding.
Sincerely,
Museum of Sex Curatorial Staff
Selection and Retention Criteria:
Materials should be pertinent to the broad mission of the Museum. Not all materials warrant permanent archival preservation. To determine which materials should be acquired or retained, the staff will use the following criteria:
- Relevance to present or potential Museum mission and requirements
- Relation to the collection and other publications on the subject, including duplication of materials already in the collection and the importance of informational or evidential value
- The legal rights of the donor to place the records in the Archives
- Compliance with copyright standards
- Condition of the material
- Availability of resources required to make the material available for research in a reasonable period of time
- Availability of preservation resources, such as storage space, copying and conservation, staff time, etc.
- Extent and terms of any restrictions to access.
- Availability of the material from other sources, such as local libraries, historical organizations, and document repositories
Appraisal:
Establishing the donation value for tax purposes is the sole responsibility of the donor. The MuSe Foundation, Museum of Sex or its staff will not, as an interested party, provide a qualified appraisal of the value of a proposed donation. Please contact the American Society of Appraisers (www.appraisers.org) to find an accredited appraiser in your area.
Documentation:
A deed of gift, which transfers ownership of the collection to the MuSe and testifies to the rights and obligations of both parties will be provided for all materials donated to the Foundation. The agreement or deed of gift shall be signed by the donor and the Foundation Director or designated representatives.
An accompanying tax receipt stating the value of the donation will be produced only when an accredited appraisal is provided by the donor.
Deaccession:
Artifacts in the permanent collections of the MuSe Foundation/Museum of Sex will be retained in perpetuity if they continue to be relevant and useful to furthering the mission of the MuSe Foundation and the Museum of Sex and if they can be properly stored, preserved, and used. When these conditions no longer prevail, artifacts may be deaccessioned from the permanent collections at the discretion of the Museum’s collection manager.
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