When a select group of art lovers were invited to a Private View one evening of a Mapplethorpe Exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, they didn’t have to worry about the dress code, as there wasn’t one.  In fact they were asked to check all their clothes at the door.

“When you look at his photos, you can see the diversity of bodies that he captured,” says Thomas Bastien, the Museum’s Director of Education and Cultural Action. “We wanted to find a way to reflect that diversity for visitors to the exhibit.” 

According to www.cbc.ca, the Museum had been discussing ways to collaborate with Fugues, Montreal’s monthly LGBT magazine, for some time, and this seemed the perfect fit. Mapplethorpe was a brazenly queer artist, creating provocative images that explored ideas around gender and infuriated conservative critics. “We learned that two other museums, in Sydney and Vienna, had done naked-visit events in the past [which] were very successful,” says Fugues editor Yves Lafontaine. “With the Mapplethorpe exhibit, it seemed the perfect match for us.”