Emma Sulkowicz is More Than "That Mattress-Toting Sexual Assault Activist"

She earned worldwide fame for her campus protest. Now this empowered 24-year-old is getting into S&M – and taking on the art-world establishment.

Photos by Katia Repina

On the third floor of a Midtown Manhattan office building, a line of guests stretches down a cigarette ash-colored hallway. In an adjacent kitchen area, a captivating, gray-bearded man wearing a black suit and a white tie with WHITNEY printed in block letters splashes cold water on his face. Two younger guys congratulate him on his work this evening. They think they’ve witnessed the end of a performance piece starring the sharp-dressed man and Emma Sulkowicz, the 24-year-old artist most famous for protesting an alleged rape by lugging a mattress through the Columbia University campus for the duration of her senior year. But tonight’s work, conceived by Sulkowicz and titled The Ship is Sinking, is still going.

“Mr. Whitney,” as Sulkowicz refers to him in the piece that debuted last Saturday, is portrayed by the bearded man, an S&M film star known as “Master Avery,” whose Kink.com profile describes his body type as that of a “swimmer” and his cock girth as “thick.”

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