Bodies. There are bodies everywhere.
Naked ones, pierced ones, bodies scantily clad in fishnet tights and leather. Bodies hanging from the walls.
Dana Johnson has touched all of them. After all, he curated and organized the whole exhibit.
“It’s nice having the range of art, the vast variety of the art from the fantasy to the real to the photoreal paintings,” he said.
It’s the 30th anniversary of the Exotic Art Exhibit at the Alwun House Foundation on 12th and Roosevelt streets. The exhibit celebrated its opening with a “phantasmagorical” show in the backyard of the large 1912 house on Valentine’s Day. The show will close on March 21.
Inside, exotic artwork spans the walls and stands on pedestals from room to room. Alwun House founding director Kim Moody, who helped start the foundation in 1971, meanders through the gallery, through paintings of women with rabbit ears and images of exposed breasts, to stop at a green birdcage on a stand in the middle of a room. The door of the cage is open; from inside, a cloth heart with an eye looks out.
“It’s not all erotic. It’s hard to get people to realize that. While there are some (pieces) that are more erotic, I would tend to call this more … exotic,” he said, gesturing to the birdcage.
The exhibit spans the first floor and basement of the home and consists of about 150 pieces from 60 artists, Moody said. All the works have been judged by three anonymous jurors — one from the city manager’s office, one from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and one arts educator.
All the pieces were also judged for the Critic’s Choice Awards, which were announced at the opening, and the gallery offers visitors anonymous voting for Viewer’s Choice, which will be announced when the gallery closes.
The show is the brainchild of Rudy Turk, who directed ASU’s Nelson Fine Arts Center art museum, Moody said.
“Call it exotic,” Moody recalls Turk saying. “Because that is broader, and everyone will read it as erotic. And that will make a sexy fundraiser.”
The Alwun House Foundation was searching for ideas to raise funds when Turk suggested the exotic art show. The show is entirely uncensored, and it gives artists the opportunity to expose audiences to what Moody called the “creative ‘other side.’”
At first, there were only eight artists showing work on one floor of the house. Today, the show attracts artists from coast to coast, Moody said, including several artists from New York, several from California, one from Texas and one from North Carolina. Some artists were originally local, while others were told about the exhibit or found it on the Internet.
One artist who’s had art in the show for 10 years is Sarah Clemens, who paints photoreal images, or highly realistic paintings that look like photographs. Johnson pointed out her painting “Laced,” which shows a woman wearing a transparent plastic dress and corset from behind, as an example of the skill the artists in the show exhibit.
“Some people may not like that subject matter,” Johnson said. “But they can’t argue that that’s one hell of a painting.”
Clemens has always been a realistic painter, she said, and she’s also always “found great beauty in the female nude.” She made her main income as an artist doing medical drawings because of the beauty she found in anatomy. Nudity is natural, she said, and the exotic art show helps people realize that.
“People need to see the nude and need to see the erotic as a natural part of life. It’s nothing to be embarrassed or to be ashamed about, it’s something to rejoice in,” she said. “If people were less uptight about this sort of thing, the world would be a better place.”
The show’s opening attracts about 400 to 600 people each year, unfailingly, Moody said. It brings in between $20,000 and $25,000, which helps to pay for electric bills, water bills and property taxes for the house as well as the expenses of running the foundation, such as printing fliers and the Garfield Organization neighborhood newsletter.
The Alwun House offers a variety of art shows besides the current one, Moody said. For example, the next show, Salon des Enfants, will display art from the Phoenix Elementary School District from April 4-11. After that the foundation will exhibit a steampunk art show from April 26 to May 9.
“Most people only know us for that exotic show, and that is really too bad,” Moody said. “They are missing out on so much more.”
The show is about more than just showing edgy art, Moody said. It’s about freedom of expression, community and giving people an opportunity to explore and nurture their fantasies.
“People look at this show as this exploitive, exotic, erotic art show,” he said. “They miss the point.”
Contact the reporter at molly.bilker@asu.edu
