Our Anatomy Project is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Objective
To engage art and story as educational tools that bring the anatomy of arousal and pleasure to life. This is a gender expansive project working to increase understanding and engage empathy.
Our Anatomy Project is curating a collection of fine art anatomical studies portrayed in connection with the personal stories from which they came. Through participatory action research, we are the researchers and we are learning together by exploring our bodies and documenting our findings. Each researcher-participant shares the story of their body personalizing and transforming how we learn and teach the anatomy of sexuality.
Our Anatomy Project aims to nurture an ongoing conversation between conceptual anatomical maps and the mystery of real bodies within the cultural and ecological systems that we inhabit. A participatory action research team is coming together to make this project possible. Curious to get involved?
In this process we are weaving alliance with a global network of individuals and organizations working for transformative justice, gender equity, body literacy and reproductive rights. Our Anatomy Project is host to an ongoing study through embodied, experiential learning and collective/personal inquiry.
The Project
Many people, especially young people, live in the story that they are weird, disgusting or broken when it comes to their sexual organs.
Currently most imagery available to teach sexual education is inaccurate and centers the able, white, binary, heteronormative identity. Even in medical textbooks, reproduction is the central conversation and many of the anatomical structures of arousal and pleasure are left out.
Our Anatomy Project endeavors to create more accurate visual maps- to deconstruct, demystify and uplift our understanding of the anatomy of arousal. And we are taking it personally! We are shifting the paradigm of anonymous, inaccurate anatomical models and painting genital portraits from life.
Our Anatomy Project is here to share images and stories from folx who live fierce and fabulous embodiments across the spectrum of gender, race, class and ability. Our hope is that we can build understanding, empathy and normalize the “taboo” stories that so many of us share.
We want more than reproductive rights.
We believe that it is our birthright to receive
Accurate
Pleasure-centered
Sex-positive
& Affirming
Body Literacy Education
Our Anatomy Project is co-creating this education and raising funds to make these materials accessible in a way that directs funds and shares leadership with those who participate on the research team.
Educator’s Kits
We’ve got you covered with slides and printable posters that are equal parts gorgeous, celebratory and real to bring home your sex education efforts. We plan to get these images into schools, doctors offices and medical text books. This will be an act of collaborative commerce benefitting those who share their stories and spread the word.
Fine Art
Including a book, educationally arousing prints for your walls and commissioned portraits. Stay tuned for our art and education tour!
Purpose & Commitments
To:
create beautiful, realistic, anatomical fine art made in relationship with live models that honors and includes the personal stories of transwomen, transmen, gender nonconforming people and cisgendered women and men
decolonize our bodies and minds through the creation of a cultural terrain that holds space for a relational, emergent and public education model for teaching and learning about human sexuality
share a pleasure infused anatomical map of the erectile network
advocate for sex education that includes pleasure and personal body agency and for all ages and people
explore how to share images of our bodies with care- acknowledging the complexities faced by people of color and queer folks in this sharing.
share complex stories about pleasure, pain, healing and ability