We’d posted about the Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation exhibit being staged as part of the Pacific Standard Time arts festival back in August. Now that it’s drawing to a close of of November 23, I wanted to remind you to catch this if you can. Here’s a recent NY Times review:
The celebrity names that weave through a different show, “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation,” are, for the most part, more arcane. This exhibition — on view at the USC Fisher Museum of Art, and organized by ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, one of the world’s largest repositories of L.G.B.T.Q. materials — documents a little-studied local underground that flourished from the 1930s to the 1960s. Bringing together elements of homophile culture, niche spiritualities and Space Age futurism, it generated a “secret society” vibe that offered a sense of safety for certain societal nonconformists in a repressive time, and paved the way for the liberation movements, gay and otherwise, of the 1960s.
A few of the associated personalities (Kenneth Anger, Arthur C. Clarke, Anaïs Nin, and L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame) are familiar. Others like Jack Parsons — a devout occultist and a self-taught rocket scientist at Caltech’s (and now NASA’s) Jet Propulsion Laboratory — are not. (Married to the painter Marjorie Cameron, he died in an unexplained explosion in his home lab.) Much of the show’s visual matter — mystical paintings, ritual costumes, sexology journals, sci-fi fanzines — has been off practically everyone’s radar for decades. Altogether it makes for a trippy package.
Read the whole article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/arts/design/pst-los-angeles-review-science-art.html.
