Live Sex Acts at Times Square Space, NYC: Photos and Relics of Midtown's Sex Clubs

Times Square Space, an artist residency and exhibition program that occupies vacant office and retail space in the heart of Times Square, is showing Live Sex Acts through November 15. It is presented with New Discretions and curated by Benjamin Tischer and Tiffany Zabludowicz. Where today's Times Square means giant screens, Broadway marquees and souvenir sweatshirts, the show looks back at the sex clubs, peep shows and adult theaters that once crowded the neighborhood.

Three artists make up the exhibition: Vivienne Maricevic, Scott Ewalt and Alix Vernet. According to Artforum's Artguide listing, their work forms an archive of clubs that operated from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. It neither moralizes nor mythologizes, and treats the pieces as records made by people who recognized what they were looking at before it vanished, or who have returned to its traces.

Maricevic, born in Yonkers in 1949, gained access to the backrooms of live-sex clubs through relationships built on trust. More than sixty-five of her photographs are on view, centered on the 1980s and on venues including Show World, the Pussycat, the Avon, Bryant Theatre and the Ramrod. The listing says everyone she photographed consented.

Ewalt began rescuing signage, posters and memorabilia in the late 1980s as Times Square was being dismantled, befriending theater operators and negotiating with demolition crews. His latest work portrays 1950s punk artist Gene Bilbrew and his collaborators and muses.

Vernet found a Philadelphia peep show owned by the same person behind Show World, tracked down the remains of its neoclassical awning and cast the surviving objects. She pairs them with Viewers, a slide projector holding a negative of the building before demolition, and a neon piece titled 60/40, named for the city's adult-use zoning rule that restricts where such businesses can operate.

The space is at 1500 Broadway, with the entrance at the corner of 43rd Street. It is open Thursday to Saturday, noon to 6 p.m., with free entry. The closing date, November 15, falls on a Sunday.

(Details are drawn from points that agree across reports by Time Out New York, Artforum Artguide.)