One year after New York’s Museum of Sex opened a branch in Miami’s Allapatta neighborhood, the boundary-pushing museum is hosting an exhibition of erotic artwork, owned by art news Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody. “Hard Art: Unruly Selections from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody” opens today and is on view through May 2026.
The exhibition includes sculpture, painting, collage, photography and installation works from the 1930s to the present by many well-known artists, including Sally Mann, Judith Bernstein, Marilyn Minter, Dash Snow and Derrick Adams.
miami new times Called DeWoody “a keeper who kept the erotic flame alive through changing social mores, opinions, cultural evolution, and political persecution.” DeWoody has been collecting art since he was a teenager (then Beatles paraphernalia, not a seven-foot-tall pink dildo or a painting of a woman vaping with her crazy eyes flashing a FaceTime camera, just two of the works in the show) and has curated shows at museums and galleries in New York, New Orleans, Chicago, London and Vermont. “For me, it’s always frustrating that I wish more work had been done,” DeWoody once told art news.
Now, thanks to the Museum of Sex, more bizarre pieces from her highly regarded collection are sure to be out there. “Hard Art” is co-curated by Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin, both in-house curators of DWoody’s eclectic collection. Museum of Sex general manager Tam Gryn describes ‘hard art’ new era “Bold, funny, important, beautiful… [DeWoody is] Ahead of its time and unpredictable. I admire the way she works to collect pieces from an erotic angle that no one else has. “
