LIVE SEX ACTS

Vivienne Maricevic, Scott Ewalt, and Alix Vernet

Curated by Benjamin Tischer and Tiffany Zabludowicz

Exhibition Dates September 18–November 15, 2026

Opening Event September 18, 6–9 PM

Opening Hours Thursday –Saturday, 12–6 PM or by appointment, email info@timessquare.art

Times Square Space and New Discretions present Live Sex Acts, an exhibition bringing together Vivienne Maricevic, Scott Ewalt, and Alix Vernet, curated by Benjamin Tischer and Tiffany Zabludowicz, on view from September 18 through November 15, 2026.

Three artists form an archive of Times Square’s vibrant sex clubs, which were active from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. There existed a dense, largely self-regulating ecosystem of sex clubs, porn theaters, peep shows, and strip clubs that operated in the space the city had abandoned. None of the works moralize or mythologize; rather, they are records made by artists who understood the value of what they were looking at before it was gone or who have returned to its traces.

This exhibition opens at a moment when the political gains of the last several decades are being actively reversed, when bodies, desires, and the spaces that accommodate them are once again subject to legislation and erasure. In that context, an archive of Times Square’s sex culture is not a historical exercise but a reminder that these freedoms were always contingent, always contested, and always worth defending.

Vivienne Maricevic and Scott Ewalt will also be in conversation at the Printed Matter Book Fair at MOMA P.S.1 at 3 PM on Saturday, September 26th, celebrating the publication of New York Then by Cultural Traffic, as well as remembering the heyday of Times Square.

Vivienne Maricevic moved through spaces that most photographers never entered, gaining access to the secret backrooms of clubs through relationships built on genuine trust and mutual respect. After recognizing a lack of male nudes in art, she began photographing them regularly. Soon after, she discovered a male burlesque club in Times Square which led her to the live sex clubs. More than sixty-five of her photographs are featured in this exhibition, highlighting Times Square’s most decadent decade, the 1980s, and clubs including Show World, the Pussycat, 7-11, the Avon, Bryant Theatre, the Ramrod, Big Top Lounge, Show Palace Follies, the Unicorn, Crazy Horse, Hombre, and Chez Elle. Maricevic’s photographs are a testament to that era. Every person she photographed gave their consent. Her photographs are portraits are made from the inside by someone who understood what she was looking at and why it mattered, which is evidenced by their warmth and joy. In her words, “the energy, the life and the character are all gone, but Times Square will always have a special place in my heart.”

When Times Square was being dismantled starting in the late 1980s, Scott Ewalt mounted a systematic effort to save what he could, befriending the women who ran the theaters that he frequented, negotiating with demolition crews, and acquiring the signage, posters, and memorabilia that would otherwise have been destroyed. His work was inspired by the disappearing landscape and is an attempt to recreate the spirit of the red-light district. In this latest work Ewalt depicts the world of 1950s punk artist Gene Bilbrew with his collaborators and muses in front of the three businesses that they filled with hundreds of unique publications, live shows and films. This subculture of rebels against the sexual repression of the cold war was an alternative reality that inspired generations of outsiders without widely being acknowledged.

Alix Vernet’s system of archiving is more fragmented, highlighting the challenge of looking back at a history that is almost entirely hidden. Discovering a peep show in Philadelphia owned by the same person behind Show World, she tracked down the remains of its neoclassical awning and cast the remaining objects. A slide projector that looks simultaneously like a peep show and a surveillance camera, Viewers depicts an original negative slide of the building before it was demolished. Vernet simultaneously recreated the neon lights of the peep show window, titled 60/40 in reference to New York City’s “60/40” rule, part of the city’s adult-use zoning framework. Under the rule, businesses with 40 percent or more of their stock or customer-accessible floor area devoted to adult material could be classified as adult establishments and become subject to location restrictions. These regulations contributed to the disappearance of Times Square’s sex clubs. These three elements create an overarching image of the club through traces, highlighting how challenging it is to track down a subculture that has been dismantled.

What grew in the sex clubs was a form of social life: anonymous, cross-class, and largely ungoverned. Crucially, it was where queer life organized itself outside the surveillance of mainstream culture and where art, activism, and sexuality overlapped. The darkened theaters and club backrooms offered freedom from judgment and taboo and, in doing so, created the conditions for a potent subculture. That culture had consequences that are still alive. Artists moved directly from Times Square’s live sex performances to the downtown performance art scene, carrying with them the logic of the sex club, its refusal of shame, and its insistence on the body as a site of both pleasure and politics. The sex-positive club nights, queer performance, and community organizing that characterize New York’s underground today are in direct conversation with what Times Square once made possible, even as the geography has shifted entirely.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Vivienne Maricevic (b. 1949, Yonkers, NY) has been photographing different aspects of erotica, sexuality, and gender since 1975. Her photographic series include Naked Men, Male Burlesk, Times Square Live Sex Shows, Porn Stars, Transsexuals (male-to-female and female-to-male), triptychs of Transvestites/Drag Queens, S&M, Embracing Gender, and the Black Male Nude. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and an artist grant from Artists Space, NYC, and was a finalist for the 2023 Studio Immersion Project, NYC. Her work has been published and exhibited worldwide. Her monograph Male-to-Female (La Cage Aux Folles) was published by Edition Stemmle in 1995, and her second monograph, She Shoots Men, was published in 2013 by Schiffer Publishing. She continues to photograph The Black Nude Male alongside her Embracing Gender – Trans, Drag Queen, Drag King, Gender Fluid, Other series. Her work is in the collections of the International Center of Photography, New York; The Kinsey Institute, Indiana; Instituto Cultural Canco Santos, São Paulo, Brazil; the Museum of Modern Art’s Permanent Library, New York; Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York; and many private collections.

Scott Ewalt (b. 1965, Woodland, CA) began as a painter and moved into digital imaging in 1987, developing a practice shaped by the collision of art, fashion, nightlife, sexuality, and subculture. Working with images as both source material and raw material, Ewalt has spent nearly four decades exploring the ways desire, fantasy, and spectacle are constructed and circulated. Drawing from the worlds of fashion, nightlife, sexuality, celebrity, popular culture, and the avant-garde, Ewalt treats the image as both artifact and fantasy. His pictures are seductive but rarely innocent. Throughout his career, Ewalt has moved fluidly between the art world and the subcultures that have continually influenced it. His collaborations with figures such as Kembra Pfahler, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Bruce Benderson, and Scissor Sisters reflect an approach to art-making that is inherently porous: images, music, performance, fashion, literature, and popular culture are not separate disciplines, but parts of the same visual ecosystem.

His work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries including Deitch Projects, Participant Inc., White Columns, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Emalin in London, Honor Fraser, the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague, and Deitch Gallery in New York. In 1999, he created a permanent installation for the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Ewalt has also contributed images to a wide range of publications and artists’ projects, appearing in books and catalogues devoted to subjects ranging from fetish and fashion to contemporary art, underground culture, and celebrity. His own publications include Scott Ewalt: Words & Pictures (2019) and Marinka: From Havana to Burlesque (2020). Rather than documenting a particular culture from the outside, Ewalt’s work suggests a deeper fascination with the act of looking itself. His images occupy the seductive territory where artifice becomes reality, where fantasy becomes history, and where the margins of popular culture become the center of the picture.

Alix Vernet (b. 1997, Denver, CO) lives and works in New York City. She received an MFA from Yale University in 2026 and a BA from UCLA in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions at Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Market Gallery, New York; and Helena Anrather, New York. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Anton Kern, New York; Kiang Malingue, New York; Chapter NY; François Ghebaly, New York; Museion, Bolzano, Italy; the Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA; and Soft Opening, London, UK. She is the 2026 recipient of the WORTHLESSSTUDIOS Artist Residency Program.

CONTENT ADVISORY: This exhibition contains explicit imagery and mature themes that may not be suitable for all audiences. Viewer discretion is advised. Admission is restricted to visitors aged 18 and over.