FOLK PORN: Anonymous 1940s Sex Drawings

In an abandoned storage unit in Philadelphia, a collector discovered more than 150 works on paper by a presumably self-taught artist. The works fall into distinct groups—pencil drawings that are often sexual jokes, explicit watercolor scenes, and drawings on mimeograph paper.Clues to the identity of the artist and the timeframe in which the works were made are embedded in the materials. The ledger paper and safety protocol forms that presumably he used as a support bear the letterhead of the well-known Philadelphia chemical manufacturing company Rohm & Haas, established in 1909. A partially affixed mailing label on the back of one of the drawings gives a Philadelphia address and indicates “foreman” as the addressee. The date 1955 is written on the back of another drawing. The clothing and hairstyles depicted seem to date from the 1940s and 1950s. A search in the company’s archives turns up a staff photograph from 1931 listing numerous foremen who might be the author of this erotic cache.Almost certainly made for his own personal amusement and titillation, the Philadelphia Foreman’s erotic drawings are a rare and fascinating time capsule of American folk porn.-Excerpt from Mousse Magazine Folk Porn, Sexual Anxiety and American Masculinity: The Philadelphia Foreman by Alison M. Gingeras

Alison M. Gingeras is a curator and writer based in New York and Warsaw. Gingeras has served as curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou Paris, and Palazzo Grassi, Venice.  Currently she serves as an adjunct curator at Dallas Contemporary and a guest curator at Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami in addition to working independently.Known for her scholarly yet anarchic approach to art history, Gingeras organized several groundbreaking exhibitions, such as “Dear Painter, Paint Me: Painting the Figure Since Late Picabia” at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002) and co-curated “Pop Life” at the Tate Modern (2009).  Most recently, she curated “My Life as a Man: John Currin” at Dallas Contemporary and “New Images of Man” at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles (Feb-March 2020).Her writing regularly appears in such periodicals as Artforum, Playboy, Tate Etc., Spike, as well as in scores of books and exhibition catalogues.  The cult imprint Heinzfeller Nileisist recently published Totally My Ass and Other Esssays—an anthology of Gingeras’ writing.