Cynthia ‘Plaster Caster’ dead at 74: Artist captured rock star privates

nypost.com:

confirmed by her representative, Variety first reported.The native of Chicago’s South Side launched her plaster-casting career in the Windy City circa 1968 after meeting an unlikely patron: Iconoclastic rocker Frank Zappa found the 20-year-old’s artistic vision funny and creative — although he declined to, uh, sit for her — and helped her relocate to Los Angeles.Although guitar god Jimi Hendrix — she “met him” at the Chicago Hilton and Towers in ’68 — was her first cast, she later expanded her oeuvre to include male filmmakers — and eventually the breasts of female artists such as Peaches, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and many others. (Albritton famously revealed that she found many will assistants who helped prep her subjects for her art.)“I was trying to figure out a way to mold a penis so I thought, ‘Well, let’s get together a kit because that will make it even more absurd and ridiculous — and professional look, and create more laughs,” she said in a 2000 interview.

Her process ended by incorporating a dental mold-making substance called alginate, which solidified around the subject’s private part and then slipped off as the participant “cooled off,” as Deadline reported.Feminists at the dawn of the women’s movement “took a very dim view of what Cynthia Plaster Caster was doing,” author and social critic Camille Paglia revealed in 2000. “They assumed it was degrading and I thought it was quite the opposite.”Paglia added that the casts actually represented “women taking control.”When the artist’s apartment was robbed in 1971, Albritton and Zappa decided the 25 casts in her collection should be preserved for a future exhibition and entrusted them to Zappa’s business and legal partner, Herb Cohen.