One year after New York’s Museum of Sex opened an outpost in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood, the boundary-pushing museum is hosting an exhibition of erotic artwork owned by ARTnews Top 200 collector Beth Rudin DeWoody. “Hard Art: Unruly Selections from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection” opens today and is on view through May 2026.
The show includes sculptures, paintings, collages, photography, and installations from the 1930s through the present by a number of well-known artists, among them Sally Mann, Judith Bernstein, Marilyn Minter, Dash Snow, and Derrick Adams.
The Miami New Times referred to DeWoody as “something of a Keeper of the Erotic Flame through ever-changing social mores, perspectives, cultural evolutions, and political persecutions.” DeWoody has been collecting art since she was a tween (at the time it was Beatles paraphernalia, not seven-foot pink dildos or painting of women flashing the FaceTime camera with crazy eyes while vaping, just two examples of pieces in the show) and has curated exhibitions at museums and galleries in New York, New Orleans, Chicago, London, and Vermont. “For me, always, the frustration is I’d like more of the work to get out there,” DeWoody once told ARTnews.
And now, thanks to the Museum of Sex, more outré subset of her well-regarded collection is definitely getting out there. “Hard Art” is co-curated by Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin, both of whom are in-house curators for DeWoody’s eclectic collection. Tam Gryn, managing director of the Museum of Sex, described “Hard Art” to the New Times as “bold, hilarious, important, beautiful . . . [DeWoody is] ahead of her time and unpredictable. I admire the way she has been devoted to collecting work from erotic perspectives no one else has.”
