The Museum of Sex in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood has opened “Hard Art: Unruly Selections from the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection,” an exhibition of erotic artworks from the collection of ARTnews Top 200 collector Beth Rudin DeWoody. The show features sculptures, paintings, collages, photography, and installations from the 1930s to the present by artists including Judith Bernstein, Cecily Brown, Nancy Grossman, and Jimmy DeSana. It is co-curated by Maynard Monrow and Laura Dvorkin, DeWoody’s in-house curators, and runs through May 2026.
The exhibition matters because it brings a rarely seen, provocative subset of a major private collection into a public museum context, highlighting how erotic art continues to challenge social mores and censorship. DeWoody’s long-standing commitment to collecting work from unconventional erotic perspectives—praised by the museum’s managing director as “bold, hilarious, important, beautiful”—underscores the enduring relevance of sexually explicit art in contemporary discourse and the role of collectors in shaping museum programming.