The Dirty Show 25th Anniversary
The Russell Industrial Center Exhibition Center
1600 Clay St, Detroit, MI 48211
Friday, February 21
How many times can you see a pair of breasts presented as fine art?
Or a highly suggestive and sexualized piece of fruit?
How about an extremely well-endowed man, headless and anonymous and photographed in black-and-white?
About 25 years worth, according to the organizers of the Dirty Show.
One of the largest erotic art shows in the country, it is juried, drawing plenty of local works but pulling from an international field of artists. It's so massive that it now takes over two weekends, using Valentine's Day as an obvious kick-off for the couple-heavy crowd.
It’s long been Detroit’s signature way of saying “the Super Bowl is over, Valentine’s Day is here and we’re ready for a bit of fine art, pornography and burlesque.”
I’ve been going for years since my days of working retail at a famous sex shop.
Shilling dildos was better than the other gigs I worked in high school, like wrangling grocery carts in the parking lot, raiding people’s pockets for loose change at the dry cleaners, making salads on the deli line.
As working at the sex shop was informative for me, a trip to the Dirty Show can be an eye-opening experience for the prudish.
“What makes it fun is there’s no one definition for it. It could be a foot, it could be a face… but every year, the artwork gets better and better,” says founder Jerry Vile.
Some of the artwork here is extraordinary, well-composed and somehow still provocative in the era of easily accessible porn of whatever-the-hell-you're-into readily available on your phone.
And it’s a huge show and undertaking for organizers. It’s well-ran, well-attended and sharply presented every year.
Back in 2018, I wrote about the evolution of the Dirty Show for the Detroit Free Press. The show was when in its 19th year, I was blown away by a handful of pieces, including the work of photographer Asia Hamilton.
She offered a take on fashion photographer Helmut Newton’s “Here They Come I & II,” which juxtaposes an image of four white supermodels fully dressed next to a similar image of the same models completely nude.
Those supermodels are replaced in Hamilton’s “Real Women” with four African-American women mimicking the fashion and pose of Newton’s work but showing a more honest portrayal of the average woman, offering a unique split-screen of fashion, decorum and the physical form underneath.
Vile told me at that time: “For years, gay art and female artists had been underrepresented in this genre. In the past, you’d see a lot of men’s magazine type of cliches in the erotic year. Now it feels like we’re naturally evolving into something else.”
You could see that in Dirty Show’s 25th year, too, although some of the evolution has seemed to stall since the pandemic and the discussion about sexual politics have become deeper, more personal, more ingrained in our personalities.
Organizers say about 40 percent of the artworks on display are from women, hung on the walls of the expansive Russell Industrial Center’s former factory-turned-exhibition hall.
The live burlesque shows have become top-notch, show-stealing stuff. In a lot of ways, it’s beginning to overshadow the hundreds of pieces of artwork, like it certainly did this year.
Stand-out performances included routines from “glittering goddess with the heart of gold” Honey Bee Rose (an absolute stunner and crowd favorite) as well as “boy-lesque” performer Faggedy Randy, who somehow felt like a more erotic version of Elton John.
I spent about three hours wandering around the Dirty Show, talking with people and seeing every piece of art and dancing and watching all manner of burlesque dancers.
After a while, a friend turned and looked at me: “I don’t think I ever want to see another pair of boobs or a penis ever again.”
It can be an exhausting trip, especially when it feels like the Dirty Show isn’t as “barrier-breaking” as it once was (a line they boast on their webpage).
How many pairs of breasts? How many suggestive fruits? How many well-endowed, headless men?
In its 25th year, the Dirty Show remains a winter-time staple in Detroit -- I’ll certainly be back.
But it’s got room to really grow – just like those well-endowed men hanging up on the gallery walls.
