Sex Ed at the KuBe Art Center: 20 Kent Street, Beacon, NY
Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center
Sex Education
Featuring Jim Peters, Katinka Huang, Yuli Aloni Primor, Innocent Nkurunziza, Fréderic Bruly Bouabré, The Sucklord, Jeffrey Spencer Hargrave, Sarah Lutz, Rafael Fuchs, Frank Hyder, Dr. Gindi, and Yigal Ozeri
July 18, 2025 – December 18, 2025
20 Kent Street, Beacon, NY
Beacon, NY – Ethan Cohen Gallery at the KuBe Art Center is pleased to present Sex Education, a group exhibition opening at the KuBe, formerly a public high school and now a contemporary art center. Presented in the very halls once filled with standardized curricula and adolescent coming-of-age, Sex Education reclaims and reframes the concept of sexual learning through the lens of contemporary art.
The exhibition explores sexuality not as a fixed syllabus but as an evolving language of the body, identity, power, pleasure, shame, intimacy, and liberation. Sex Education interrogated the cultural architectures of sexual knowledge: how it is taught, withheld, policed, fantasized, and internalized.
Featuring works by Jim Peters, Jeffrey Spencer Hargrave, Katinka Huang, Yuli Aloni Primor, Innocent Nkurunziza, The Sucklord, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Yigal Ozeri, Sarah Lutz, Rafael Fuchs, and Frank Hyder the exhibition draws upon a wide spectrum of artistic voices.
Jim Peters paints and draws autobiographical scenes of erotic intimacy, rendering moments of physical closeness with classical technique and emotional sincerity. His work affirms the beauty and complexity of long-term desire through a deeply personal and vulnerable lens.
Jeffrey Spencer Hargrave’s works on paper explore intersections of queerness, race, and identity, collapsing internalized repression with external expectations in a vibrant, unfiltered visual vocabulary.
Yuli Aloni Primor’s Madison depicts a young female body pressed against the inside of a glass case, trapped, exposed, and scrutinized. The work evokes the early sexualization of girlhood and the psychological pressures placed on the female body, turning vulnerability into quiet resistance.
Katinka Huang's work explores intimacy, transformation, and the ecstatic potential of becoming. In the featured painting, Isn’t She Lovely, a female figure appears to birth herself within a surreal, radiant space—offering a joyful and poetic metaphor for self-creation, desire, and embodied renewal.
Innocent Nkurunziza, working from Rwanda, presents a sculptural painting made from tree bark, with phallic forms protruding from the surface. Drawing on ancestral knowledge and natural material, his work speaks to masculinity, vitality, and the sensual power of the body as it exists in rhythm with the earth.
The Sucklord, known for his irreverent interventions into pop culture, brings a subversive edge to the conversation, using humor, parody, and kitsch to critique capitalist sexual fantasies and sci-fi masculinity myths.
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, the late Ivorian artist and visionary, offers a unique lens through his text-and-image cosmology, rendering a philosophical map of humanity that includes sexuality as part of a broader encyclopedic code of life.
Yigal Ozeri’s hyperrealistic portraits explore beauty, presence, and the emotional charge of being seen. His work raises quiet questions about intimacy, perception, and how desire is shaped through representation.
Just as the high school once housed blackboards and (perhaps) abstinence lectures, it now becomes a site for vulnerability, provocation, and unlearning. Installed in the KuBe’s science wing, the show activates a space where private discovery once clashed with public instruction.
Sex Education considers sex not simply as content, but as context, a social and emotional curriculum shaped by lived experience. Where formal education fails, art intervenes.
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