The 74-year-old artist, who died last week, reversed the roles of rock musicians with his infamous plaster casts and groupie image.

“She’s like the Michelangelo of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” Pamela Des Barres once said of her friend and colleague Cynthia Albritton. Better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, the 74-year-old artist died last week after battling a long illness. She is one of the last living “supergroupies” of the American music scene of the 60s and 70s, who earned a reputation thanks to her remarkable bonks and eye-opening stories. But Albritton went further and discarded the personal parts of the musicians he admired and nullified the perception of women as muses. “She’s the most outstanding groupie of all because of her art form,” Des Barres said.

Albritton was born in Chicago in 1947 and discovered the strength of plaster molding in its artistic elegance at the University of Illinois. When her instructor advised her to mold anything that could “stay in shape,” the shy but mischievous Albritton thought without delay of erect limbs. , which would then become conveniently flaccid and avoid getting stuck in its molds. He left home at 19 and teamed up with a younger friend, Dianne, whom he had met at the Rolling Stones Hotel in 1965. They called themselves “the Plaster Casters of Chicago” and began to break their own molds.

Both have become infamous thanks to rolling stone’s 1969 “organizational issue,” which featured the most productive fuckers like Des Barres, Miss Mercy, Trixie Merkin and many others that rocker Frank Zappa had combined into a women’s organization called The GTOs. Albritton was never ashamed of the term “organization,” which characterizes fans, not rock stars who slept with them willingly, as cowards; however, she also sought to be different. It was plaster, he decided, what would make them stand out. She and Dianne dreamed of one day having their own exhibition – Dianne left the casting soon after.

Jimi Hendrix was Albritton’s first featured visitor, and to the best of her ability, she and Des Barres agreed on the 2010 VH1 documentary Let’s Spend the Night Together. “He was calm, relaxed, very calm in the mold,” Albritton said. , even though “his pubis got stuck”. In fact, he also encouraged the vain rock stars to try to overcome it through the presentation to the casting. Among his successors were Jello Biafra, former of Dead Kennedys, Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks, Richard Lloyd of Television and Wayne Kramer of MC5.

There have been, inevitably, misadventures. Peter Tork of the Monkees “didn’t get into the mold,” Albritton once explained, so his cast is pretty, uh, short. Reader in 2002, “took before he could push his penis deep into the mold, only the head came in. “In this way, Albritton’s art has become a challenge, a conscious challenge that can reveal a certain male vulnerability. I was surprised and excited to find out that they were as worried as IArray,” he said of his subjects.

Zappa among their biggest champions and looked to give the Chicago Plaster Casters their first show. But an exhibition never materialized. After an attempted break-in at Albritton’s apartment, Zappa manager Herb Cohen advised keeping the plasters in a safe. But Cohen refused to abandon them and in 1993, the same year Zappa died, Albritton went to court to get them back: they gave them all. however, 3 back, and it is not clear which celebrity dongs were lost in rock.

But Albritton didn’t go for just anyone, not even Kiss, who wrote his 1977 song Plaster Caster about him. he said once, but only if he liked his music. In this way, she may be considered a tasteful author, especially at a time when women had little other enterprise in a male-dominated music industry. According to all reports, he thought of how she throws a “lasting monument” to the art of others.

Not everyone agreed. In the 2001 documentary Plaster Caster, editor Camille Paglia describes how “feminists of the time had a very dark view of what she was doing. . . they assumed it was degrading. ” And in the 1970 film Groupies, a furtive member of the band Ten years later can be seen mocking Albritton’s paintings and calling them “pathetic”; we are also informed that members of Led Zeppelin once threw her into a fully clothed pool. Female music enthusiasts were treated with contempt, but during the casting, Albritton assumed a position of control and asserted her own sexuality.

Like many facets of rock ‘n’ roll of the ’60s and ’70s, Albritton’s profession is just one of the many things you can’t believe happening now. As musician Ian Svenonius says in the film Plaster Caster, “All taboos have been crossed unless the penis remains invisible. I think peak heterosexual men have only fixed their own penis at this point. His painting is emblematic of the freedom of the time, involved with the most elusive thing of our days: laughter.

Later, Albritton leveled the game box and turned her talent into tits, which she hung on the wall of her Chicago apartment: Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O and Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier among them. And in 2000, Albritton’s dream came true and he was given an exhibition in New York. While it’s unclear what will become of his phallus palace now that he passed away, he leaves an exciting legacy: literally grabbing life through the balls while you can.