Artist Samantha Nye, whose work focuses on older nonbinary women, presents Web of Love at Cuesta College

You know you’re encountering an artist with a vivid sense of humor when she titles her painting series Attractive People, Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places. Samantha Nye’s paintings celebrate older queer women—usually in their 70s—in provocative scenes. 

Her current practice goes well beyond painting. In 2013, she began her Visual Pleasure/Jukebox Cinema series of Scopitone video installations.

A Scopitone was a 1960s jukebox found in bars and cocktail lounges that played short 16mm color films with synchronized sound—a forerunner to music videos. The films were decidedly campy and often titillating. Nye has now recreated five of these films for video installations. In 2023, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film and Video, which along with a Creative Capital Award has helped fund her new exhibition, Web of Love, a multimedia installation coming to Cuesta College this month.

“Web of Love is an immersive video installation centered on a near shot-by-shot remake of the 1966 Scopitone film of the same title,” Curator and Gallery Coordinator Tim Stark explained in a press release. “Nye’s adaptation stars Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, features music by Erin Markey, and was filmed on location at the Madonna Inn, Sycamore Springs Spa, and in a custom-built, faux-heart-shaped hot tub suite inspired by 1970s romance resorts.”

The installation includes wall-to-wall red shag carpeting and four pink, heart-shaped hot tubs sourced from the iconic but now closed Poconos Palace Honeymoon Resort. Visitors are invited to bring a pillow and climb into one of the empty tubs and view Nye’s videos. The exhibition explores ideas of queer intimacy, nostalgia, pleasure, and care.

“I’ve been a huge fan of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens,” Nye said via Zoom. “They’re both very important to me. When I was a younger artist, probably 15 or more years ago, they came to speak at the undergrad that I went to [at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts], and they really left a big impression on me. It was always this idea that maybe one day I could work with them, so when this came around, it was completely a dream come true.” 

Sprinkle is a certified sexologist, performance artist, filmmaker, former sex worker, and advocate for the decrimalization of sex work. Her longtime partner, Stephens, is a filmmaker, artist, photographer, and UC Santa Cruz professor in the art department.

They shot a documentary called Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency (2025) about the CZU Lightning Complex Fires in August of 2020 that nearly destroyed the house they share in Boulder Creek and wreaked havoc north of Santa Cruz, burning more 86,000 acres and destroying nearly 1,500 buildings. 

The film, told in seven chapters, highlights the resiliency of their neighbors and enlists artists, Indigenous elders, witches, formerly incarcerated firefighters, educators, and the queer community—not to mention their aging Labrador, Butch, and their neighborhood white peacock, Albert—to talk about how to better treat the planet. It will be screened on Jan. 28, when the couple gives an artists’ talk.

“Samantha’s exhibition is No. 1,” Stephens said over Zoom. “We’re just sidekicks to that. She was generous enough to invite us to come show this new film. We’re thrilled because when we were driving down to LA last year, we saw a big fire near San Luis Obispo over to the east. Fire’s everywhere in California now, and this film is about the fire that we live through in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s a documentary but also an artwork. We’re grappling with how to live in a fire-ridden state, just like everyone else is. And we do that through art.”

The documentary is whimsical. For instance, they have fire prevention goats talking and texting one another, and the peacock, Albert, has a lot to say. They have rituals with trees and wisdom from Indigenous elders. It’s a lot of fun but also poignant because so many people lost everything.

“There’s a lot of sadness and tragedy in the film,” Stephens acknowledged, “but we’re always trying to offer hope to our viewers. I think that’s the connection that we have with Samantha: We use humor. We use hope. We use sexiness, right? To try to come up with new ideas as opposed to just sinking into this mire of despair. That’s really what our film tries to say.”

“The film is the third in a trilogy of queer environmental films,” Sprinkle noted, “but they’re for everybody, not just queer people. We identify as ecosexuals, which started as a little bit of a joke, but then it became so generative that we are still—since 2008 when we married the Earth—we still identify as ecosexual. It just means that you love the Earth and that that’s important to you in your life.”

Sprinkle and Stephens both enjoyed collaborating with Nye on the remake the 1966 Scopitone film Web of Love and noted how it aligned with their own work and interests. 

“I would say her film is pretty eco-sexy,” Sprinkle quipped. “We got to go the hot spring, and we got to shoot in the rock room. Beth gets to wear a snake costume. We came down to Madonna Inn and shot for four glorious, romantic, eco-sexy days.”

“We had so much fun,” Stephens chimed in.

All three artists shed light on important issues, but their connecting thread is humor.

“I think that my work is funny in a really intentional way,” Nye explained. “But I don’t think it’s funny just because it’s an older woman doing a thing. So many times, when women are being sexual and they’re not the women that culture tells us we’re supposed to look at being sexual, people’s reaction is to feel uncomfortable and think that that’s the funny part. I do hope that my work can push people toward a different place because, to me, this is playful and campy. But the humor comes from all the intentionally funny parts, and the sexiness is just undeniable because these women are sexy at any age, you know?” ∆

Contact Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Jan 22-29, 2026.