CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/27/2016

Anatomical Venus Launch & Morbid Anatomy Symposia at La Luz de Jesus!

Saturday and Sunday, October 29 – 30, in celebration of the Morbid Anatomy Museum's first California pop-up, La Luz de Jesus gallery presents an all day symposium on a series of macabre subjects, special tours and a book launch for The Anatomical Venus by Morbid Anatomy co-founder Joanna Ebenstein! Symposium speakers include Megan Rosenbloom of the Norris Medical Library of USC; Joanna Ebenstein, Tracy Hurley Martin and Tonya Hurley of the Morbid Anatomy Museum; Morbid Anatomy scholar in residence Elizabeth Harper; 'Gross America' author Richard Faulk, and many more!

ABOVE: A spread from 'The Anatomical Venus' by Morbid Anatomy Museum founder Joanna Ebenstein

The symposia at La Luz de Jesus will include films on Victorian taxidermy tableaux of kitten weddings and tearful cemetery pilgrimages; illustrated talks on macabre Catholic relics, 1960s televangelist Miss Velma and books bound in human skin; a multimedia spoken-word performance devoted to Kraftwerk; and much more!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 29: 12-6PM
12:00 - Tracy Hurley Martin: Introductory remarks
12:15 - Richard Faulk: Witches, Weavers, Pimps, and Whores: Curse Tablets and the Rarely Seen Working Class in Ancient Rome
12:45 - Megan Rosenbloom: Anthropodermic Bibliopegy: Books Bound in Human Skin
1:15 - Elizabeth Harper: The Miraculous Relics of “Uncle Vincent”
1:45 - Joanna Ebenstein: The Morbid Anatomy Museum
2:15 - Stephen Vesesky: Kraftrwerk: Sex, Lies and Audiotape
2:45 - Tonya Hurley & Tracy Hurley Martin: Solo-Me-O
3:15 – Break
3:45 - Louis Sahagun: Master of Mysteries: The Life and Death of Manly Palmer Hall
4:15 - Daniel Paul: Dr. Jaggers, Miss Velma, the Universal World Church, and Christmas
5:00 - Ronni Thomas: Screening of The Man Who Married Kitten: Documentary on the Victorian Taxidermist Walter Potter
5:30 - Tomas Prower: The Cult of Santa Muerte

ABOVE: Venerina (Little Venus), life-sized, late 18th century dissectible wax model created by the workshop of Clemente Susini. Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, Italy. Photo by Joanna Ebenstein.

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 30: 4-7PM
The Anatomical Venus Talk and Signing
Free, non-ticketed book signing event for the latest title from Morbid Anatomy Museum’s co-founder & creative director Joanna Ebenstein — The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic. The book was the product of 10 years of research, image collection and photography.

Ebenstein will speak on the fascinating life and afterlives of The Anatomical Venus — a life-sized dissectible wax woman with Venetian glass eyes, real human hair and strings of pearls created in late eighteenth-century Florence as the centerpiece of the first truly public science museum. Once seen as an ideal way to entice a general public into the study of human anatomy, today, she also confounds, troubling our neat categorical divides between life and death, body and soul, effigy and pedagogy, entertainment and education, kitsch and art.

La Luz De Jesus Gallery
4633 Hollywood Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90027