SAN FRANCISCO—The Center for Sex and Culture has announced the receipt of a $5000 grant from the Cumulus Fund as seed money to host a retrospective exhibition in September 2015 of the photographs of San Francisco gay radical sex photographer Mark I. Chester, to be called City of Wounded Boys & Sexual Warriors. Along with the exhibition, CSC says it also wants to produce a companion book of Chester's photographs because of the important history the pictures tell about the gay, leather and sexual underground communities in San Francisco over the past four decades. However, additional donations are needed to complete this project and the Center is seeking tax deductible donations, which can be made here. Funds will also be raised through the pre-sale of books and a special fundraising performance event at CSC to be held on Saturday, Feb. 14, 2015 (Valentine's Day!), called (Bitter) Sweet Sex.
Mark I Chester is a uniquely San Francisco artist. He has created an explicit photographic diary that documents his life in San Francisco's sexual underground since the late 1970s. His photographs capture the emotionally explosive and politically tumultuous times through personal portraiture that intertwines the normally exclusive photographic genres of fine art portraiture, sexually explicit work and social documentary photographs. It is an unparalleled record of this particular time in San Francisco for both the number of years that it covers and its intimate revelations about the people who lived through those times. Chester's photographs can be found on his website, markichester.com.
"I cannot emphasize enough how important Mark's work is to San Francisco and its sex-related communities, as it is to sexuality studies and artistic representation as a whole," noted CSC Executive Director and co-founder Carol Queen. "Preserving it properly and disseminating it via a book and gallery showing very much needs to happen. We are proud to participate in this significant retrospective of his fine art photography, which has such great importance culturally, sexologically, and in the context of the changing San Francisco queer and sex communities, particularly the men's community which has been so impacted by HIV/AIDS. As we learned last winter during our exhibit of 1980s-1990s safer sex posters, many young people, even among communities that were greatly impacted by HIV/AIDS, do not know the history of the epidemic, of queer community growth, of LGBT rights struggles, and other elements of alternative history that are not well-covered in school or by the mainstream culture. Mark's work is by no means only historically significant documentation – but that is certainly one element of its importance."
CSC will host a retrospective of Mark's photographs during the month of September 2015. The exhibition is timed to coincide with the artist's 65th birthday and the San Francisco leather community's annual celebration, the Folsom Street Fair. In addition to the exhibition, events will include a very special slideshow and talk by Chester about his work.
For more information, visit the The Center for Sex and Culture website or contact Mark at 415-621-6294415-621-6294, CSC can be contacted at [email protected].
More detail about (Bitter) Sweet Sex will be forthcoming soon. Please save the date: February 14, 2015.
