Admission: $5.00

San Diego Art Institute hosts Dr. Paul Koudounaris on Wednesday, October 5 from 6pm-8pm for a “Sex Ghost” lecture and slideshow

The San Diego Art Institute is pleased to present a month-long series of Halloween-themed programming in celebration of two concurrent exhibitions: “The Haunted Art of T. Jefferson Carey” and “The Dead Are Not Quiet: A Group Exhibition of Macabre Art”. As part of this programming, SDAI is once again inviting the acclaimed macabre art historian Dr. Paul Koudounaris to lecture on the topic of “Sex Ghosts”. The event will take place on Wednesday, October 5 from 6pm-8pm at San Diego Art Institute, 1439 El Prado in Balboa Park. The event is $5 or free to SDAI Members.

Do you like sex? Do you like death? If so, boy do we have a lecture for you. Historian/photographer Dr. Paul Koudounaris is the author of three award-winning books about historical displays of death, and his research has taken him to over seventy countries and made him one of the world’s foremost experts in the visual culture of mortality. In the process he has also turned himself into a compendium of world folklore relating strange hauntings. In a special lecture and slideshow, Dr. Koudounaris will discuss the cultural boundaries that separate the living from the dead, with a special emphasis on the way that border is broached via sexualized ghost stories. History is in fact replete with erotic hauntings, and tales continue to the present day. Dr. Koudounaris will explore this fascinating history in a uniquely bizarre lecture, with a special focus on the body of lore he has studied most in depth, the erotic ghost stories that surround the mummies in Sicily’s Palermo Catacombs, where over two dozen sexualized ghosts have claimed to reside.

This event is sponsored, in part, by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.