NEW YORK CITY—The Museum of Sex, whose mission is to preserving and presenting the history and cultural significance of human sexuality, is opening its largest and most immersive exhibition to date: Super Funland: Journey into the Erotic Carnival. Carnivals and fairgrounds have long drawn on the human subconscious, celebrating repressed desire, promiscuity, and rebellion against sexual and societal norms, and serving as outlets for hedonism throughout history, thus allowing revelers to experience decadent pleasure and, quite often, vice.
Following the Industrial Revolution, fairs began to be carried out on a larger scale in the form of traveling carnivals and expositions. Millions of visitors would make pilgrimages to the World’s Fairs, where exhibitions on the midway ranged from famed designer Norman Bel Geddes’ topless “Crystal Lassies” to a primitive version of a sex robot; and Salvador Dali’s Pavilion "Dream of Venus" at the 1939 World’s Fair, which promoted surrealist art and featured bare-breasted performers who posed in bizarre tableaus and dove into large water tanks in an aquatic fantasy of subconscious reveries.
Inspired by the social, artistic, and purely salacious aspects of historical fairground attractions, Super Funland reimagines the illicit thrills of a lost world of travelling carnivals and World’s Fairs for 21st century audiences, blurring the line between art and experience and inviting visitors to become participants in this history as well. Super Funland’s exploration of carnival’s roots is accompanied by a multi-floor interactive exhibition of thirteen humorously explicit games and amusements reimagined by contemporary artists, allowing visitors to lose themselves in the carnality and simple joy of the fair.
The exhibition opens with the living history of Al Stencell, who proverbially “joined the circus” at age 11 and documented the midway’s underbelly of burlesque, strip, and girlie shows along the way. The exhibition then transitions into an immersive 180-degree cinema, where a film illustrates the carnival’s origins, followed by “Stardust Lane,” a forty-foot kaleidoscope where six dioramas depict examples of bawdy moments from the World’s Fairs and Coney Island, which emerged in the 19th century as one of the most notorious meccas devoted to hedonism. A variety of amusements encouraged licentious behavior, with headline attractions such as the “Blowhole Theater,” which exposed the lower halves of skirt-wearing visitors. Upon visiting New York in 1909, Sigmund Freud himself purportedly said that “The only thing about America that interests me is Coney Island.”
Super Funland’s highlights include a 4-D immersive “Tunnel of Love” ride, an erotic fortune-telling machine modeled on RuPaul and styled by personal designer Zaldy; and an elaborate illuminated climbing structure leading to a two-story spiral slide which whisks visitors into the Museum’s psychedelic carnival bar, Lollipop Lounge. Visitors will also have the opportunity to test their love with our biometric “Kissing Booth” sponsored by Super Funland partner One Night, the last-minute hotel booking platform known for its unique and selective group of hotel affiliates. The kissing booth measures passion between partners and award prizes—including a one night stay in a One Night affiliated property and a $69-dollar shopping spree in the Museum shop.
Original commissions were created by an international team of artists and designers that include Bompas and Parr (UK), Droog (Netherlands), Bart Hess (Netherlands), Rebecca Purcell (US), RuPaul (US), Snøhetta (Norway), and more
The Museum of Sex is located at 233 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016. It opens daily at 11 a.m., with last entry at 9 p.m. weekdays, 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Super Funland attractions and curiosities have been created in partnership with One Night hotel app, SONOS, We Vibe, Bella, Cowgirl, LELO, Kangaroo, and Felix & Ambrosia CBD.
