The Brooklyn Rail

How do we pay tribute to Dionysus and bring carnality into sacred precincts? This has been our dilemma since antiquity. The exhibition Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in‬ American Cults and Communes documents the role of religious communities as incubators for redefining group relations, exploring sexuality as a path to accessing the divine, and finding interdimensional identities. The curator Jodi Wille’s exemplary pioneering research, contacts with community members, and immersion in historical archives, together with associate curator Christian Goodwillie (head of the Hamilton College Burke Special Collection Library) has unearthed a trove of formerly unseen material. Beginning with the Shakers (active 1774– ), whose celibacy avoided sex altogether, and moving on to Victorian champions of sexual freedom, spiritualism, abolition, and suffrage, like Victoria Woodhull (b. 1838, d. 1927), we see a broad range of twenty intentional communities. The exhibition takes us into the 1960s and ’70s, with groups like the Source Family and The Farm. The over-the-top Cockettes of sixties Haight-Ashbury, with their gender-bending, LSD-fueled troupe, and the Unarius Academy of Science’s (1954– ) extraterrestrial films and spaceship mounted on a Cadillac make our current art world seem rather staid. This exhibition should be a prerequisite for understanding performance art, experimental theater, and the work of artists like Carolee Schneemann. Here, most of the art is process-based and devotional, which separates it from much contemporary art, and makes it seem so alive. The Museum of Sex is to be commended: they took a considerable risk to provide a venue and mount this exhibition of three hundred objects at considerable expense.

Cults received negative stereotypes due to the murderous Manson Family. Yes, some charismatic gurus ruled over harems, but this is not the whole picture. Women play a much more complex role in this history, often in leadership capacities. Born to a Quaker family and assigned female at birth, the Publick Universal Friend (b. 1752, d. 1819) became a gender-nonconforming leader following a near-death experience, and claimed to have been reborn as a divine messenger and genderless servant of God. The Friend’s disciples welcomed Black and Native American members. Lois Waisbrooker, a nineteenth-century advocate for women’s rights, in her book Sex Revolution advocated free love based on mutual consent and spiritual connection as a way of freeing women from oppressive marriage laws. Even the Source Family, once centered around the patriarchal Father Yod with his thirteen wives, became more matriarchal as he empowered his wives. The Source Family was brilliantly documented by one of Father Yod’s spiritual wives, Isis Aquarian (AKA Charlene Peters). A first-rate photographer and archivist, Aquarian’s diaries and photographs bring their history to life. A vitrine holds a stunning tarot deck that belonged to Galaxy, Father Yod’s youngest spiritual wife. Each Source Family practitioner hand-colored their own deck as part of their esoteric practice.

Sadly, Herbert Marcuse, with his Eros and Civilization, reduced the sexual revolution to a sex-versus-labor model. Marcuse failed to grasp the revolution’s spiritual dimensionality, amalgamation of East/West religions, and tantric sexual practices as paths to enlightenment. In the exhibition we see a creative dynamism, archetypal explosion, and exploration of planetary and psychic dimensions that far transcends the earthbound Freudian model of Marcuse. The creativity and imaginary capacity of these communities is astonishing. Curator Jodi Wille has directed a documentary on Unarius Academy of Science called Welcome Space Brothers (2023), to be released in spring 2026. In the film we see the founder of Unarius Ruth Norman, who identifies as the Archangel Uriel, in all of her elaborate costumes and wigs. Her peacock feather cape is shown surrounded by channeled student paintings. Unarius promoted student creativity in the form of paintings, films, and past-life psychodrama documentaries as a modality of healing. The group produced three feature films and over one hundred videos, which aired on public access TV in the 1980s and continue to air today. With their processionals of costumed aliens, caveman tableaus, and fire-breathing monsters, the viewer wonders if they inspired Alejandro Jodorowsky, who took the same devotional approach to his craft, and his film The Holy Mountain (1973).

The Israelite House of David—founded in 1903 by Benjamin Purnell and Mary Purnell in Benton Harbor, Michigan—owned property communally, practiced vegetarianism and celibacy for bodily purity, were pacifists, and did not cut their hair or beards. They owned the popular Eden Springs amusement park, zoo, and vaudeville auditorium, plus a fruit packing plant and lumber company. Their long haired, bearded musical ensemble toured nationally in vaudeville barnstorming circuits. In a vitrine, we see an illustration of their musicians in dapper suits. The Israelite baseball teams were one of the only white teams to play against the Negro League during segregation and even featured a female pitcher. Their House of David basketball team toured with the Harlem Globetrotters in 1954. Showmanship combined with an entrepreneurial spirit could be found in many of these communities.

Dean and Dudley Evenson, a husband-and-wife collaborative team, made pioneering documentary videos in the seventies of alternative communities, Rainbow Gatherings, Native American elders, and the counterculture movement. They were accomplished musicians, and created an experimental musical genre combining flute, harp, and nature sounds which influenced many of the period’s musicians. They later founded Soundings of the Planet, a label dedicated to healing music that sold millions of albums influential in New Age and wellness circles.

John Humphrey Noyes (b. 1811, d. 1886), a Yale Divinity student, founded The Oneida Community in preparation for Christ’s return. Noyes believed love and sex, and other commodities, should be shared equally among the members—all women were married to all men. “Property and child-rearing were communal, with unusual freedoms such as elders initiating young members of the opposite sex. It provided opportunities for women in work and in the arts. Men shared domestic duties, reflecting egalitarian ideals.” After internal dissent and a backlash to Noyes’s more controversial practices, Noyes fled to Canada in 1879. The community then abandoned their group marriage and sexual practices and became a joint stock company, founding the Oneida Limited, which became America’s top silverware manufacturer. Who knew granny’s silver set had sprung from such radical roots?

Utopia: Three Centuries of Sexuality in‬ American Cults and Communes is a must see for anyone hoping to understand the cultural sea change that occurred in the sixties and its earlier origins. The exhibition’s complex scholarship gives the viewer a full spectrum of the practices of these intentional communities and their search for meaning and spiritual transformation. Here we see how critical theory and approaches which left out the importance of spiritual quests have failed to present a much-needed view. I would highly recommend this exhibition for all art students.