“I was shocked and delighted to find that they were as insecure as I was,” she has said of her subjects. In this way, Albritton’s art became a challenge, a knowing dare that might expose a certain male vulnerability. As did Wayne Kramer from MC5: he encountered a premature plaster mix which, as Albritton put it in the Chicago Reader in 2002, “set before he could push his dick all the way into the mould – only the head got in”. Peter Tork of the Monkees “didn’t get a chance to penetrate the mould”, Albritton once explained, so his cast comes up rather, er, short. Among his successors were Jello Biafra, formerly of Dead Kennedys, Buzzcocks’ Pete Shelley, Television’s Richard Lloyd and MC5’s Wayne Kramer. “He was really laid back, relaxed, very quiet in the mould,” said Albritton, even though “his pubes got stuck.” He was also surely an impetus for vainglorious rock stars to attempt to one-up him by submitting themselves for casting. Jimi Hendrix was Albritton’s first celeb client – and her best, she and Des Barres agreed in the 2010 VH1 documentary Let’s Spend the Night Together. Photograph: Sion Touhig/Sygma/Getty Images ‘Standing out’ … Cynthia Plaster Caster’s work at New York City gallery Threadwaxing Space in 2000.

They called themselves “the Plaster Casters of Chicago” and set about breaking moulds of their own. She left home at 19 and teamed up with a younger friend, Dianne, who she had met at the Rolling Stones’ hotel in 1965. When her teacher suggested that she could cast anything solid that could “retain its shape”, the shy but mischievous Albritton immediately thought of erect members, which would then conveniently go flaccid and avoid getting stuck in her moulds. “She’s the most notorious groupie of all of them because of her art form,” said Des Barres.Īlbritton was born in Chicago in 1947 and discovered the power of plaster casting in her art class at the University of Illinois. But Albritton went a step further, casting the privates of the musicians she admired and flipping the notion of woman as muse. She was one of the last living “supergroupies” of the 60s and 70s US music scene, who built a reputation on their famous bonks and tell-all tales. Better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, the 74-year-old artist died last week after battling a long illness. “S he’s like the Michelangelo of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll,” Pamela Des Barres once said of her friend and peer in penis admiration, Cynthia Albritton.

Plaster casting