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SPEAKER: To a new exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, it explores and celebrates facets of gay male sexuality with lovingly-detailed drawings. It's called "The Flowers." Marianne Combs reports.

MARIANNE COMBS: Walk into Mia's Minnesota Artist Exhibition space, and the first thing you see is a trough style urinal. Above it is a detailed panoramic drawing of men in a club in various stages of undress engaged in erotic play. Artist Joe Sinness says the scene is taken from the 1980 film Cruising, starring Al Pacino.

JOE SINNESS: And the idea for that is to create a highly, erotically-charged atmosphere that's specific to an S&M or a leather bar in the gay community.

MARIANNE COMBS: Sinness's solo show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art invites viewers to enter a space dominated by gay men. The main gallery features numerous portraits. Some men pose seductively, others simply stare at the viewer. Some of the material is explicit. Sinness says his goal was to create an environment where gay male sexuality is recognized and embraced.

JOE SINNESS: My work over the last 10 years has been a lot of unpacking shame surrounding sexuality, and some of it is a personal journey. This is just a segment of something that, I think, is beautiful and interesting, and I want to show that beauty to the public.

MARIANNE COMBS: Sinness's drawings contain references to everything from Greek sculpture to male pinup magazines from the '50s and '60s. There are portraits that feature backdrops from classic Hollywood musicals.

JOE SINNESS: In some cases, the performers are portraying themselves as the leading lady of the musical. In other cases, I'm just making sure that there's a lot of eye contact with the viewer, and the figures look empowered. And there's a lot of focus on the way that they're posed.

MARIANNE COMBS: Sinness says, there are several layers of coded information in the work, which not all viewers will pick up on. But he says that's not important. What he really wants is for them to appreciate the light, color, and forms.

Nicole Soukup is the assistant curator of contemporary art at Mia. She says in many ways, Joe Sinness is a very traditional artist. He's a master draftsman, and this show is predominantly about depicting the human form.

NICOLE SOUKUP: The bodies are idealized, they're made iconic, but you still see the flaws. They're still regular people, You see body hair. They're not airbrushed out by any means, and they're still beautiful and desirable and loving.

MARIANNE COMBS: Soukup says Sinness's work pairs well with the classic Greek statues down the hall. But unlike those sculptures, Sinness's show is overtly transforming the museum galleries into a queer space. Sinness says, he's inspired by artists like Paul Cadmus, David Hockney, and Gustave Courbet. He points out his images of men disrobing in parks are not so different from classical paintings of women bathers.

JOE SINNESS: The way that the characters are performing in nature and that reminds me of classic female nude painting like Courbet, where you have a beautiful surrounding and the forest becomes like a chapel, and then there's also this sexual activity happening in the space. And it becomes a very loving, natural-looking event.

MARIANNE COMBS: Sinness says, the title of the show, "The Flowers," is inspired in part by Jean Genet's 1943 novel about the Parisian underworld.

JOE SINNESS: And also, flowers themselves are delicate and beautiful, precious and loved.

MARIANNE COMBS: "The Flowers" opens tomorrow night at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It runs through October 29. Covering the arts, I'm Marianne Combs, Minnesota Public Radio News.