Sylvia Sleigh

The man's exposed ankle in Lawrence and Susanna Delagado in an interior (1968) is more significant than it looks.

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

In one painting, a nude man poses as a reclining odalisque, a female slave in an Ottoman seraglio. In another, a man's bare back meets the viewer as he directs his attention to five male companions. Sylvia Sleigh (1916-2010) had no problem challenging art history in her paintings, exposing traditional themes as stereotypical at best, and degrading at worst. Women had too often been "painted as objects of desire in humiliating poses," Sleigh once said. "I don't mind the 'desire' part, it's the 'object' part that's not very nice."

Sleigh's subjects were no gods of antiquity favored in Renaissance art, but rather their human counterparts, resplendent with body hair and contemporary apparel. By inserting the male figure into the traditional female role in the 1970s, Sleigh criticized traditional gender roles.

Many of Sleigh's works, however, sought to equalize the genders on canvas. One such example, Lawrence and Susanna Delagado in an interior (1968) was exhibited in November at the SOMArts Gallery, to be placed at a Bay Area cultural institution upon the show's conclusion. Sleigh's estate tasked the Women's Caucus for Art with placing the oil painting, and group president Janice Nesser-Chu contacted Dr. Stephanie Hanor, the director of the Mills College Art Museum.

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"Moonlight Topaz"

Between 1942 and 1945, 11,200 Japanese-Americans were sent to Topaz Camp. It was located in a parched stretch of desert about 125 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Most of the prisoners were from San Francisco. Some were forced to live in horse stalls at Tanforan Race Track before being shipped there. Two-thirds were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with a crime. Kids lucky enough to turn 17 while at Topaz were administered a two-question loyalty test, which could win them "freedom" through the draft; resistors came to be known as the "No-No Boys" and were immediately shipped to another camp.

Amazingly, in the midst of this madness, an art school was born. Boasting 600 students, the school offered classes in watercolor, architectural drafting, oil painting, and anatomy, taught by 17 reputable instructors. One was professor Chiura Obata, who found his own UC Berkeley students similarly interned. Because writing and photography were forbidden, these images became the only record of camp life, and its primary pastime.

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Eadweard Muybridge

Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coe brings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds each week.

Curator Jamie O'Keefe was conducting a standard inventory check at the San Francisco Fire Department Museum when she noticed tiny lettering in the corner of a photograph: Muybridge Studio.

O'Keefe was floored. Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was best known for his pioneering work in motion photography. (Read a review of his 2011 exhibit at SFMOMA, "Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change.") The photographer was known for using 12 to 24 cameras at a time and his own shutter in an attempt to create images of suspended motion, resulting in a visual illusion of movement. He has been the focus of major exhibitions worldwide, most notably at the Tate Britain, the Smithsonian, and the Bay Area's own Cantor Center at Stanford University.

What's left of his portfolio is sought after by serious collectors and pre-eminent institutions across the globe -- and the images don't come cheap. Artnet estimates that Muybridge's famous Animal Locomotion plates sold, at auction in 2009, for a $45,000.

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Who knew? A periodical called Sexoogy from the 1930s.

Are you afraid that people are judging your paltry, boring home library? You know those barren shelves need more of everything: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, magazines, and periodicals. But where can you find replenishments, volumes that might be rare and maybe even a little racy? Saturday marks the first Library Spring Smut Sale at the Center for Sex & Culture.

If you think the offerings consists of cast-offs, the likes of which you spot haphazardly displayed on someone's front steps or outside a BART station entrance, you're mistaken. The center's library boasts an impressive collection of mostly donated materials, and it seeks to maintain items shunned by traditional booksellers, libraries, and museums. Saturday you have the chance to look through items it chooses to sell.

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Hanne Blank

Be careful what you assume, and be careful what you consider "normal." So sings the perpetual chorus here in über-diverse San Francisco. As it should be. But there's a big assumption a lot of us probably have overlooked. It involves the heterosexual. It's not that "Some people aren't hetero," but rather, "Hetero hasn't been considered the norm -- or even a thing at all -- for very long." Author, historian, and lecturer Hanne Blank breaks it down in her book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Blank shows how equating hetero with normal affects our laws, cultural institutions, scientific study, artistic expression, and ideas of love and romance. Underlying it all are assumptions about others -- and ourselves -- that most of us have never thought to even acknowledge.

She appears Tuesday (April 24) at Good Vibrations on Valencia. We spoke with her recently about her book.

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A True Hero Gone Unnoticed.

Bayard Rustin was a fervid orator and incisive rhetorician who served as a key figure in the civil rights movement for more than 60 years. He introduced Mahatma Gandhi's principles of nonviolence to American activists, and he organized the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. So why doesn't Bayard Rustin receive equal standing with King in American history? It's a question of considerable debate, but Rustin's status as an openly gay man who served jail time as a conscientious objector during World War II guaranteed his marginalization during the 1960s among civil rights leaders, who feared such traits could be used by opponents to discredit their movement.

Religious studies professor, activist, and author Michael Long delves into Rustin's legacy in I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters, a collection that provides intimate insight into the relationships and principles that fueled Rustin's work for social justice until his death in 1987. Long reads from his work and talks about Rustin's legacy Wednesday night at City Lights.

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Barbara Nitke

Barbara Carrellas

Certain people seem to live several lives in the one lifetime that they are given. Barbara Carrellas is one such person. Carrellas started her career on Broadway. In 1982 Carrellas was a general manager, her show Nine won five Tonys including Best Musical, and she was on top of the world. Then a lot of people close to her started to die. The 1980s was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the number of people it claimed was astounding. Carrellas lost as many as four friends per week, and she needed a way to cope with her anger and grief.

Carrellas learned about the New York Healing Circle, a support group for people with AIDS and their loved ones.

"It was a great group, and it helped me with the guilt and incredible bitterness and anger I was feeling," says Carrellas.

At this healing circle Carrellas met Annie Sprinkle and Joseph Kramer. The three realized they all had the same question: "What are we going to do about sex?" The sexual revolution continued in the 1970s. How did a group of people go from that to the horrors of the AIDS crisis?

Sprinkle and Carrellas began to study the ancient spiritual practice of tantra, while Kramer began to research forms of Taoist sexual teachings.

"We were looking for clues as to how we were going to find hot, satisfying, and safe sex, with a spiritual component. The spiritual component being one that is so important, after all that death. When I started studying tantra, I essentially took the genitals out of sex -- I studied just the energetic components of tantric sex. I was floored, gobsmacked, and amazed at the amount of energy that can run through a human body," says Carrellas.

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The Last Party is an unabashedly partisan documentary hosted by a mid-recovery Robert Downey, Jr., as both he and his generation (hey, that's us! Me, anyway!) try to make sense of the world they're inheriting. Through interviews with celebrities and civilians alike, this sense-making mission is set against the backdrop of the nonsensical 1992 election.

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Tammy Lo

Sarah Vowell

Author (and former SF Weekly columnist) Sarah Vowell really has a lot to say about the role religion has played in American life. Her previous book, The Wordy Shipmates, is about New England Puritans, while in her most recent, Unfamiliar Fishes, now out in paperback, she traces the history of Hawaii from the missionaries coming to the events of annexation to the U.S.

Vowell, who appears at Herbst Theatre on Monday (March 12), talked with us about the Bible verse she believes influences American life and foreign policy, how 1898 was the year the U.S. became an empire, and how the banyan tree symbolizes America for her, even though it's an Indian species.

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Film buffs and/or devotees of Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the worst American film ever made is not Plan 9 From Outer Space, or anything else by Ed Wood. It was made by an El Paso resident by the name of Harold P. Warren, and it's called Manos: The Hands of Fate.

It's not "so bad it's good," nor is it "so bad it's bad." Manos exists in its own little inexplicable universe that defies all attempts to quantify it using such linear human concepts as "good" or "bad". I've seen it countless times on MST3K, including a near-religious experience with a packed audience of fellow MSTies at the second ConventioCon Expo Fest-A-Rama in 1996.

And now, Manos: The Hands of Fate is being restored.

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