Tit Print, acrylic paint on paper, 1993
A former NYC prostitute and porn star for twenty years, Annie Sprinkle (born Ellen F. Steinberg) morphed into a positive-feminist artist, sexologist, and pivotal activist in the sex workers' rights movement. Her works explore female (and male) sexuality in all its multilayered form, through feminist sex films, books and articles, theater performances photography and painting. Sprinkle defines herself as an ecosexual, a radical environmental activist believing in the idea of the earth as a lover. Since the early 2000s she works with her wife Beth Stephens as a duo. Their works were featured in Documenta14, and this was - in her own words - ‘ a pinnacle... it was very symbolic for me because anyone would have thought a pornstar and a prostitute can't be an artist’.