The artist who incited a police raid on Los Angeles’s Ferus Gallery in 1957 will have a major exhibition at Deitch Projects’ former space at 76 Grand Street in Manhattan this fall. The poet, occultist and artist Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel (1922-1995), better known as Cameron, was a follower of the British occult leader Alistair Crowley, a star of Kenneth Anger’s short film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and a muse for artists including George Herms and Wallace Berman. When Berman included a reproduction of Cameron’s drawing Peyote Vision (1955) in an exhibition at Ferus Gallery, the LAPD shut down the show for indecency. After the incident, Cameron said she would never show her work at a commercial gallery again.
Twenty years after her death, however, Cameron’s work—including Peyote Vision, which depicts a couple in flagrante delicto—returns to gallery walls. The Cameron Parsons Foundation, Jeffrey Deitch and Nicole Klagsbrun, who has represented Cameron’s estate since 2007, are teaming up to present Cameron: Cinderella of the Wastelands (8 September-17 October). The exhibition, which features around 60 paintings, drawings, pieces of writing and ephemera, is an expanded version of the show held last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where Deitch served as director. (Some works will be for sale; others are on loan.) “The Cameron exhibition was the last project that I initiated while I was at MOCA and I wanted to bring a version of the show to New York City,” Deitch said in an email.
