World Erotic Art Museum

Among the many museums gracing Miami, Florida, this one is devoted to a particularly interesting subject. The World Erotic Art Museum (WEAM) opened on South Beach in October 2006 and is housed in a building purchased by the owner of the collection, Naomi Wilzig.

Naomi Wilzig is the widow of the late Siggi Wilzig, CEO and president of The Trust Company of New Jersey. At the request of her son to purchase some “conversation pieces” for his bachelor’s apartment, Naomi began gathering examples of erotic art from Roman times to modern. Wilzig’s interest eventually lead to her authoring five books on the subject of erotic art in history and, when the collection became too large for her home, she purchased a building in South Beach to house it.

The building now has a Starbucks on the first floor and access to the museum on the second floor is via an elevator in the lobby. Only those 18 and over are admitted to the museum and visitors are able to browse 20 rooms filled with over 12,000 square feet of artwork. Covering historical periods from Pre-Columbian to Roman to the Middle Ages and on into today, the art shows the changing sexual mores of time and culture.

One particularly famous item on display within the museum is a large example of a male appendage that served as a prop in the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film, “A Clockwork Orange.”  There’s also a one-ton Kama Sutra bed, a gigantic four-poster with more than 130 hand-carved Kama Sutra scenes and posts which are gigantic, eight-feet-tall phallic reproductions.