Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton, an avid tunes admirer who became infamous in the ’60s and ’70s for her plaster casts of rock stars’ erect penises, has died after a very long ailment. She was 74.
The passing of the self-proclaimed “recovering groupie” — and 2010 Midwestern mayoral prospect — was verified by her agent, Variety first described.
The native of Chicago’s South Side released her plaster-casting job in the Windy Town circa 1968 soon after assembly an unlikely patron: Iconoclastic rocker Frank Zappa uncovered the 20-year-old’s artistic vision amusing and inventive — though he declined to, uh, sit for her — and aided her relocate to Los Angeles.
While guitar god Jimi Hendrix — she “met him” at the Chicago Hilton and Towers in ’68 — was her 1st cast, she afterwards expanded her oeuvre to incorporate male filmmakers — and at some point the breasts of feminine artists these types of as Peaches, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and lots of other people. (Albritton famously disclosed that she discovered numerous will assistants who served prep her topics for her artwork.)
“I was striving to determine out a way to mildew a penis so I thought, ‘Well, let’s get alongside one another a kit simply because that will make it even additional absurd and absurd — and specialist glance, and build more laughs,” she said in a 2000 job interview.
Her procedure finished by incorporating a dental mold-earning material termed alginate, which solidified about the subject’s personal element and then slipped off as the participant “cooled off,” as Deadline claimed.
Feminists at the dawn of the women’s motion “took a quite dim view of what Cynthia Plaster Caster was performing,” writer and social critic Camille Paglia exposed in 2000. “They assumed it was degrading and I assumed it was really the opposite.”
Paglia extra that the casts in fact represented “women using management.”
When the artist’s apartment was robbed in 1971, Albritton and Zappa made a decision the 25 casts in her assortment must be preserved for a foreseeable future exhibition and entrusted them to Zappa’s business and legal husband or wife, Herb Cohen. Nevertheless, the rock stars declined to have their penises exhibited — resulting in a casting hiatus that lasted by way of 1980.
All through her 10 years off, Albritton’s function was immortalized by Gene Simmons of KISS in the music “Plaster Caster” for 1977’s classic “Love Gun” album, which provided the iconic lyrics: “My really like is in her fingers … “The plaster’s gettin’ tougher and my love is perfection. A token of my really like for her collection.”
Meanwhile, when she tried out to get them back again, Cohen balked, ensuing in a legal struggle in 1993. The artist inevitably reacquired all but a few of them when the court docket dominated in her favor.
Albritton last but not least got that debut exhibition of her do the job in New York Metropolis in 2000.
The subsequent calendar year, she was the matter documentary “Plaster Caster,” and also participated in the 2005 BBC documentary, “My Penis and I,” which detailed filmmaker Lawrence Barraclough’s interior struggle to accept the size of his possess penis.
In a weird modify of occupation pace, Albritton unsuccessfully ran for mayor of her hometown Chicago in 2010 — on the “Hard Party” ticket, with a campaign guarantee to be “hard on crime.”
“I am not a politician,” Albritton said at the time. “I am an day to day citizen that is sick and weary of seeing the problems of our town escalate and I imagine we ALL need to take part in assisting to make our town the most effective it can be.”
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