As Republicans continue cutting corners on Americans’ rights and freedoms through oppressive conservative legislation, it should be remembered that right-wing politicians and activists have consistently targeted artists who question their beliefs. Visual artists and performers who have pushed boundaries through aesthetic and conceptual means have been denied funding opportunities, blacklisted from artistic spheres, and threatened by religious zealots, among myriad other attempts to stifle their visibility and suppress their voices.
Recently, artist Shellyne Rodriguez has become the target of verbal harassment and threats after right-wing media released video of her confrontation with anti-abortion activists on the Hunter College campus. Weeks later, when a New York Post reporter showed up unannounced at Rodriguez’s apartment, the artist was filmed threatening him with a machete, an incident that was further amplified by conservative media. Rodriguez was fired from ancillary roles at Hunter and the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and faces charges of threatening and harassing.
Hundreds of artists and scholars expressed solidarity with Rodriguez, calling on Hunter and SVA to “support their faculty members during right-wing attacks.” Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of the New York-based gallery PPOW which represents the artist, drew links to reactionary and conservative-backed attempts to block public funding for the artist and activist’s 1990 exhibition. AIDS David Wojnarowicz. Tongues of Flame. “Now I feel like nothing has changed, and in fact the strategies of these organizations have become more sophisticated,” Olsoff said.
Below, check out six artists who faced right-wing attacks for creating work that didn’t fit conservative agendas.
Dread Scott
In 1989 artist Dread Scott showed his work “What is the correct way to display an American flag?(1988) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in an exhibition organized by the college’s Black Student Association. The installation included a 34-inch by 57-inch American flag on the floor below a photomontage of South Korean students burning the flag and flag-draped coffins. Viewers were invited to write in a book placed on a shelf above the flag, allowing viewers to step on it to get there.
Then-President George GW Bush called the exhibit “shameful” and Republican Senator Bob Dole of Kansas introduced a bill making it illegal to display the American flag on the ground. The law is passed unanimously.
Scott’s exhibit has become a focal point for conversations about the nature of patriotism and the limits of free speech in the United States. Tony Jones, then president of the School of the Art Institute, said it was “the responsibility of institutions like ours to protect art, however controversial, charming or soporific”.
David Wojnarowicz
In 1990, the conservative American Family Association (AFA) attacked David Wojnarowicz and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which had funded $15,000 for his exhibition at the University Galleries of Illinois State University titled Tongues of Flame. The show has extensively addressed the AIDS epidemic. The AFA and its founder, the Reverend Donald Wildmon protested the exhibition and sent a brochure headlined “Your tax dollar helped pay for these ‘works of art'” to 1,578 newspapers, 523 congressmen, 3,230 church leaders and 947 Christian radio stations, blaming the NEA for funding an exhibit she called “obscene”. The brochure included 14 images of Wojnarowicz, mostly of gay men from his Sex Series (1988–1992).
Wojnarowicz sued for copyright infringement and $5 million in damages. The tribunal fired his claim under federal copyright law and gave the artist only a dollar, but issued a subpoena to the AFA to send his pamphlet. “Public money is used to finance secret wars, to buy instruments of death,” Wojnarowicz told the Washington Post at the time, pointing out the AFA’s hypocrisy in suing the NEA. “The pennies that come out of people’s pockets to fund the NEA are nothing – and absolutely no death.”
Robert Mapplethorpe
The American Family Association (AFA) again approached the NEA in the early 1990s for funding for an exhibition by Robert Mapplethorpe entitled The perfect moment. The Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) mounted the show in 1990, a year after Mapplethorpe died of complications from HIV/AIDS. The exhibition of around 175 works included a wide range of photographs exploring the artist’s career, but the AFA took offense to showing nude photographs of gay men. On the opening day of the exhibition, 20 police officers entered the CAC and handed over indictments to director Dennis Barrie – Barrie and the museum were charged with obscenity for seven of the works in the exhibit. In a highly publicized two-week trial, a jury sided with the museum and the charges were dropped. In his victory argumentcounsel for CAC stressed the vital importance of understanding the larger context of The perfect moment and made the historical assertion that a work need not be beautiful or palatable to have intrinsic artistic value. “We adapted the defense to the idea that art didn’t have to be pretty. It can be difficult,” attorney H. Louis Sirkin later said. writing. “We don’t like these images, but they are key to telling the story.”
NEA Four
Performance artists Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes, known collectively as the “NEA Four”, were funded in part by the US government through the NEA until 1990, when a Congressional amendment articulated federal funding of the arts on the premise of “broad standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public.” Finley, Miller, Fleck and Hughes individually addressed themes of homosexuality, feminism, sex positivity and the AIDS crisis through graphic means through their performance work. Despite approving the independent artist proposal grant peer review process, the Bush-era NEA president John Frohnmayer vetoed them based on the subject. The artists filed a lawsuit against the NEA in 1993, alleging that the amendment to the endowment award process was a violation of the First Amendment’s right to free speech. The District Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals alongside the artists, awarding each of them the equivalent of the grant funding in damages. However, the The Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeal’s decision, stating that the “decency clause” did not infringe the right to freedom of expression. Subsequent Congress prohibits the NEA from funding individual artists from 1994.
Chris Ofili
Nigerian-British painter Chris Ofili caused irritation in 1996 with his atypical mixed-media rendition of “The Blessed Virgin Mary”, depicting Mother Mary as a black woman surrounded by collaged images of female genitalia and dung smears of elephant. The painting also relies on two pieces of hardened elephant dung as support – a medium which Ofili employed regularly at this stage of his practice in reference to his travels in Zimbabwe. Naturally, Ofili’s painting bristled many during his debut and his international circuit in the Sensation exhibition because of its blasphemous character at first sight, but Ofili noted at the Tate in London that he wanted “to juxtapose the profanity of porn clips with something that is considered quite sacred”. When the exhibit landed at the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 1999, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was so offended by the painting’s inclusion that he decried it as “sick stuff”. and attempted to strip the museum of approximately $7 million in annual city funding if not removed, saying he was not “entitled to a government grant for desecrating someone else’s religion”. The Brooklyn Museum held firm despite threats of eviction and the show went on with Ofili’s painting still included, but a the offended customer splattered white paint under the plexiglass of the screen and on the board in protest.
Emma Sulkowicz
Performance artist and former Columbia University undergraduate Emma Sulkowicz, “Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight)” (2014-2015) was an endurance performance in which the artist undertook from carrying a standard twin XL dorm mattress everywhere they went on campus until their alleged rapist was expelled or expelled from college. The alleged Sulkowicz rapist was found not responsible for sexual misconduct in 2013 after the university investigated the artist’s allegations. The artist wore the mattress throughout their last day at Columbia. Defying the university’s request not to bring “large objects that might interfere with the proceedings,” Sulkowicz attended their 2015 graduation ceremony with the mattress in tow as they had earlier promised. Although Sulkowicz received an outpouring of public support for her performance and the experience that informed her, a lot editionsin particular the conservative tabloid The New York Post, criticized the artist for “shaming without proof” and “destroying men’s lives with lies and innuendo”. Following graduation, #RapeHoax Posters walked up to the Morningside Heights campus calling Sulkowicz a “pretty little Liar.”
