This mixed-media collage is a combination of vintage Valentine’s Day chocolate hearts and cut-up acrylic paintings of Candy Barr. A play on the infamous 1950’s Texas stripper’s name but also an homage to the person she actually was, not perceived to be by fans of her adult movie, managers, and crooked strip club owners.

Marrying her most famous but also strongest image (her cardboard cut-out used to promote her presence at clubs), with the sweetness of lace and roses, this huge 36″ x 60″ canvas gives an almost life-sized representation to Juanita Slusher’s fearless and passionate history. A child sexual-abuse survivor and runaway, the victim of domestic abuse who not only successfully defended herself by shooting her husband but was acquitted (unheard of in those times), a poet, an activist, and even a mobster’s muse.

The “world’s first pornography actress”, Candy Barr, is on record saying, “Men who’ve seen the [my] film always talk about how I smiled while I was having sex. I was told to smile. And I knew if I didn’t smile, something worse would happen to me after that camera was turned off…. I wasn’t out there trying to get a rise in a man’s Levi’s… I just enjoyed the dancing.”

Excerpt from “Candy Barr“, by Skip Hollandsworth, September 2001, Texas Monthly