We The Nipple

#WeTheNipple

The Issue

The human body has always been a central subject of art. Its representations have evolved with technologies of expression: from cave drawings, to sculpture and painting, to photography and video.

Yet leading 21^st century social media platform, Instagram, the most popular platform for artists who share their work online, and its parent company, Facebook, both ban photographic representations of the nude body, while making an exception for artistic nudity in sculpture and painting.

The Art Action: On June 2, 2019, the National Coalition Against Censorship and artist-photographer Spencer Tunick created a nude installation in New York City to challenge the censorship of artistic nudity on Facebook and Instagram.

Photo credit: Fay Fox

What’s at Stake?

Social media has dramatically increased artists’ ability to reach–and build–their audiences. Unless their medium is photography and their subject is the body.

The nudity ban prevents many artists from sharing their work online. It particularly harms artists whose work focuses on their own bodies, including queer and gender-nonconforming artists, and the bodies of those in their communities. Museums and galleries are constrained when even promoting exhibitions featuring nudes.

To raise awareness about the range of art censored by Facebook and Instagram, artist-photographer Spencer Tunick created a public art action in June 2019. 125 nude bodies took a stance in the streets of New York City against social media censorship of art.

For decades, many activists and artists have worked to destigmatize the body and oppose bans on its representations both online and off. It is impossible to mention them all. Highlighted here are just a few who have fought against unreasonable — and arbitrarily applied — online “community guidelines”:

• Lina Esco, a longtime activist, launched the 2012 #FreeTheNipple campaign and 2014 film to spotlight the censorship of women’s nipples.
• In 2014, feminist artist Micol Hebron posted a digital male nipple pasty in 2014 and encouraged the public to use it to cover female nipples on social media.
• Shoog McDaniel is a queer artist whose fat-positive photography is frequently removed from Instagram, even photos that Shoog pre-censors. They also highlighted how Instagram’s content-reporting process allows users to target “hated” bodies.
• Photographer Dragana Jurisic‘s Instagram account was removed over a photograph of a nude model whose breasts were “self-censored with a leaf” to abide by community guidelines. The image was removed anyways, along with thousands of other posts.
• Savannah Spirit uses Instagram to create and distribute her photographs, including nude self-portraits, among her fans, curators and potential collectors. After grappling with frequent removals and a difficult appeals process, and several account deletions, Savannah began to diligently pixelate the nipples in all her portraits. Regardless, many of her images continue to be removed.
• Painter Clarity Haynes explores the torso as a site for portraiture, focusing on themes of healing, trauma and self-determination. Clarity is a tireless activist whose work supports the visibility of the LGBTQ body. She has repeatedly and singlehandedly rallied support when artists’ images are erroneously deleted and accounts removed, as she did recently when artist Betty Tompkins’s account was taken down over a painting. Clarity, also a painter, has been repeatedly removed from Facebook for up to a week, at times affecting her ability to promote her shows. Despite the guidelines allowing paintings and drawings of nudes, Clarity and Betty’s works are censored several times a month, followed by several weeks of “shadow banning.”

The Campaign

We call on Facebook and Instagram to create an exception to their nudity restrictions to allow for art in the medium of photography.

Platforms like Instagram allow up-and-coming artists, and all artists without access to traditional methods of distribution, to reach global audiences on a scale unimaginable to earlier generations. Museums and art institutions can open their collections, and promote shows, to ever-widening audiences. Particularly for photographers, Instagram has opened new worlds of exploration and expression.

Facebook and Instagram users are diverse. Some may admire the human body, while others see it as a sign of humanity’s fall from grace. However, individual users can always choose to block content that they dislike. It should not be Facebook’s role to impose the beliefs of some of its users on the entire global community and do so in a way that stifles artistic expression.

Banishing all photographic images of the nude human body from social media, even when some of these images are in the collections of the worlds’ top museums, imposes an anachronistic regime of shame and censorship.

We ask Facebook and Instagram to remove that mantle of shame and update its Community Guidelines/Standards so to allow for artistic creativity to thrive.

Read NCAC’s official letter to Facebook

Supporting Organizations, Museums and Art Institutions

Supporting Artists, Practitioners and Arts Supporters

Join the campaign and challenge the censorship of artistic nudity on Facebook and Instagram.

Media inquiries

We celebrate Micol Hebron, a feminist artist who posted a Digital Male Nipple Pasty in 2014. She encourages social media users to cover female nipples with a male nipple icon to both avoid censorship and call out the gender inequality of nudity restrictions.

Stories

Learn More

NCAC’s Arts Advocacy Program, launched in 2000, is the only national project dedicated to working directly with individual artists and curators involved in censorship disputes. It protects artists’ rights to participate in the democratic dialogue by defending public access to their work, and supporting their ability to freely express views that might be unpopular or controversial. We resolve controversies through education and advocacy, avoiding the need for legal action. Controversial issues are not confined to one medium of expression or one social sphere. We work with diverse constituencies to mobilize a wide base of support, produce policy documents and materials for educational programs, and analyze censorship trends. We also train artists to become their own advocates and develop strategies to counter censorship in all its ever-changing forms.

Read more about the complicated relationship between art and social media.

Get Involved

If you’d like to discuss how we can work together to create a better environment for artists on social media, please contact us at [email protected].

We’d love to hear from you!

Media

Contact: Nora Pelizzari, NCAC Director of Communications at [email protected] or 212.807.6222, x105

Press accreditation for June 2nd art action: Please fill out this form and return to [email protected]

Press releases

Launch (April 2019) | Nipple Donors (May 2019) | Art Action (June 2019)

Select coverage

“100 People Will Pose Nude in NYC to Challenge Instagram and Facebook’s Censorship” April 15, 2019

“Artist Wants Hundreds to Pose Naked in NYC Streets in Social Media Censorship Protest” April 17, 2019

“Artist Spencer Tunick Is Looking for an Army of Nude Models in New York City to Help Him Fight Facebook Censorship” April 19, 2019

“Spencer Tunick Nude Installations Take On Facebook and Instagram Censorship” April 20, 2019

“The Photographers Fighting Instagram’s Censorship of Nude Bodies” May 28, 2019

“Artists take stand against social media censorship” May 28, 2019

“Free the nipple: Artist Spencer Tunick protests Instagram censorship of art photography” May 30, 2019

“Spencer Tunick’s Nipples” May 31, 2019

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