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distinction between the erotic and the pornographic, and to appreciate that throughout human history, men and women have been experimenting with sex and sexuality and representations of it, she said. Students are often reluctant to make the visit. “Most of them end up saying that they love it, that it broadens their outlook,” Mitchell said. “But they’re taken aback when they meet Naomi. They just don’t expect to see this grandmother talking to them about these things or to be so knowledgeable and fascinating, as she tells them the history of every single object.”

Naomi is proud of having achieved the stature of an expert, a role in which she is often asked the difference between the erotic and the pornographic. “I explain that porn has only one message: Get it on! Erotic art is art, and should be addressed as any fine piece of art. You consider the talent of the artist, the meaning of the art, the connection between viewer and the work, the psychological or sociological reaction to it. In a simple sense, the erotic is sexual. But it can also be sensual, romantic, beautiful, suggestive. And one usually has an intimate reaction to erotic art.”

“What did I understand before about what people do sexually and why? Now, I have much more understanding of what motivates and drives people. That they’re different sexually doesn’t make them wrong. Give me my soapbox and I’ll tell you. The public only thinks of the erotic as pornographic. They go to see movies of chain saw killings and people being massacred and Halloween horror movies, but show a naked body and they go berserk. Let the government and the church mind their own businesses. If it’s consenting adults—Hear! Hear! Do what you want, just don’t do it by force and don’t do it with children,” Naomi said.

About 2,500 people a month visit the World Erotic Art Museum, and Naomi spends much of her day working to build attendance and planning a monthly thematic series. In 2009, they included a show of black artists’ work about Josephine Baker, the expatriate African-American dancer and entertainer, and exhibitions of objects illustrating the Kama Sutra, and erotic art on surfboards. She spends hours every day continuing to search for erotic art, reviewing offers of objects made to her online, and trying to upgrade the collection. She was pleased recently to have snagged a handsome and witty wood sculpture, by Connecticut artist Andrew Giarnella, titled G String, of a nude female torso. Using resin and wood filler, the artist built breasts and buttocks over a violin, and then ran a single string from the neck to the base of the pelvis.

Naomi is often kept busy, too, attending benefits, sometimes several a week. In the space of two weeks, for example, she attended benefits for the Buoniconti Fund to Cure Paralysis, the Israeli Defense Forces, the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, the Rabbinical College of America, and one honoring her publicist as a “Champion of the Arts” in Miami. At the benefits, she frequently meets people who, learning what she does, say, “You’re the face of erotic art in Miami?”

“ ‘Sure am, and I’m proud of it!’ I say. Several times a week people stop by my office, not to say how beautiful the art is, but to thank me for showing it. I feel proud of what I have ended up doing with my life.”

THEODORE LUDWICZAK

Rock Star

“You never know what you’ll find

on the side of the road.”

It was low tide when Theodore Ludwiczak put down his trowel and stepped back from the sixty-six-foot bulwark he had spent more than two years building. A series of powerful storms in the early 1980s had taken a considerable bite out of his property along the Hudson River in Haverstraw, New York, just north of the Tappan Zee Bridge, and Ludwiczak, a retired contact-lens grinder, hoped the seawall would protect it from further erosion. As he assessed his handiwork, he felt a flash of disappointment. Aesthetic concerns replaced practical ones. “The wall looked bare and primitive,” he said, with a Polish accent. “It needed something.”

He looked around without knowing precisely