By 2006 they began hosting juried competitions, with many Chicago artists competing for top prize and acquisition by the famed institute.
But, she says, 1997 was “a coming-out year” for the collection and its gallery. Curator Catherine Johnson-Roehr says the art collection was primarily limited access in the early years, intended only for scholars of erotica and other researchers.
Since it’s just a four-hour drive from Chicago, the Kinsey Institute has exhibited and collected many Chicago-based artists. The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction houses the collection at Indiana University in Bloomington. His interest in art as an expression of human sexuality continues today in the art collection at the Kinsey Institute. In fact, Kinsey collected photography (among many other sex relics) and was slated to produce a book on art before his death in 1956. What artists have known and celebrated all along-that we are sexual creatures with myriad desires-only became fleshed out in the social sciences with the groundbreaking work of sexologist Alfred Kinsey.
