Maryland School District Censors American Diversity Posters for ‘anti-Trump’ Bias
The posters were deemed to break the school's policy that forbids classroom materials that attempt to sway the political opinions of students.
Black History Month Art Exhibition Removed From School Admin. Offices; UPDATE: NCAC & ACLU Urge District to Immediately Restore Exhibit
An exhibition of artworks celebrating Black History Month was removed from display in a San Jose School district building after complaints calling the works offensive.
New Report Catalogs Attacks on Artistic Freedom Around The World in 2016
The number of cases registered in 2016 more than doubled the amount registered in 2015, an increase of 119%, which translates to an extra 469 attacks.
NCAC Responds to American University Museum’s Removal of Controversial Sculpture; UPDATE: NCAC Advises AU Museum on Strategies to Avoid Future Controversy
American University Museum in Washington D.C. flubbed its approach to a controversial sculpture after it claimed it did not want the message of the sculpture to be deemed the institution's own.
Missouri Congressman Defends Student Painting Attacked for Animal Depiction of Police; UPDATE: Without Permission, Rep. Lawmaker Removes Painting
Representative Clay has stood in support of artistic free expression in the face of criticisms that the painting contains an anti-police message.
Georgia Lawmakers Attack Museum Exhibition Exploring AIDS Epidemic
David Wojnarowicz (born 1954, died 1992) Untitled (Buffalo), 1988-89. Vintage gelatin silver print, signed on verso, 28⅝x35¾; inches. Collection of Michael Sodomick, Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York In statements reminiscent of the culture wars of the 1990s, three Republican lawmakers in Cobb County, Georgia have attacked a museum exhibition that [...]
American Nocturne: When Public Art Engenders Controversy; UPDATE: Mural Removed, Elgin Arts Commission Will Decide Fate
NCAC has sent a letter to Elgin Mayor David Kaptain supporting the mural's return in advance of the City Council's vote on its fate on July 13th.
Penny Dreadful in Paint: Accusations of Blasphemy Hit Virginia MOCA/Hi-Fructose Exhibition
Mark Ryden: Fountain, 2003. Oil on Panel, 12x6.25 inches. ©Mark Ryden. In a replay of former New York Mayor Guiliani's attempt to grab attention by attacking "blasphemous" art, Ben Loyola, a member of the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission, is directing his ire against the work of LA-based painter Mark Ryden, featured in Turn the Page: The First Ten Years of [...]
Utah Art Center Gets $60k Settlement from City for Eviction, Censorship
After cries of censorship, an eviction and a lawsuit, The Central Utah Art Center (CUAC) will receive a $60,000 in a settlement with the city of Ephraim, it was announced Friday. The lawsuit was filed in early 2013 after the CUAC was evicted from the space they had inhabited for 20 years. The city alleged the CUAC hadn't fulfilled its [...]
Smithsonian Chief Who Caved to Censorship Pressure from Congress Will Retire Next Year
G. Wayne Clough is familiar to followers of NCAC as the Smithsonian Institution Secretary who unilaterally pulled a video from a National Portrait Gallery exhibition at the behest of Congressional Tea Party pressure. Clough has just announced he will resign … Continue reading →
Protests After Alaska School Censors Student Art Show
"Art is a way to speak our minds!!!" one hand-drawn sign reads. "IB Art Matters!" reads another. These signs hang on the art display boards where art, done by Palmer High School's IB Art students, once hung. In response to recent censorship by the High School, students have made their voice heard in defense of their work and in support [...]
NY Art School Boxes Student Sperm Project
The recent rather heavy-handed treatment of Marc Bradley Johnson’s MFA thesis project at New York’s School of Visual Art (SVA) raises some interesting concerns—especially for an institution that aims to play a leadership role in the bio-art movement. Johnson’s project consists of a refrigerator containing 68 vials of his sperm arranged on a grid. The artist originally intended to give [...]
On the Fifth Day of Censorship, the Censors Gave to Me…A Golden Chastity Key
The Twelve Days of Censorship Years of Censorship Battles 120 Days of Sodom Egyptian Breasts Milking Nude Ladies Dancing Lords Banned for Witchcraft Bush Monkeys Swimming Nude Adults laying A golden chastity key Aristophanes‘ The Birds Catholic French outrage, a Clear Channel Dove and no art in Newark library Joy Crane's chastity belt sculpture was too risque for the "family-friendly" Brookings Art Council Annual Juried Art Exhibit in [...]
Artists Speak Out Against Cancellation of Amiri Baraka Talk at Caldwell College
The staff at The Visceglia Gallery were very much looking forward to the opening of its GET IT ON THE RECORD exhibit, a collection of works by twenty-one African-American artists investigating the "collective history of Black America." As part of the exhibit, poet Amiri Baraka had been invited to speak. That invitation was rescinded, however, because the College President and others [...]
Art, Porn and Censorship: the Mansfield Art Center (OH) Covers up Painting
A painting, included in a juried exhibition show at the Mansfield Art Center in Ohio, was partially covered with black paper. The painting had been selected for inclusion in the show, but the management of the Art Center decided that the outside edges of the work, which were covered with clippings from pornographic magazines, should not be seen by anyone. Sans [...]
Don’t Let Them Eat Cake
Sweden’s minister of culture has been in the global news spotlight recently, and not for her nation's propensity for neo-noir literature. Minister Lena Adelson Liljeroth was invited to attend and speak at World Art Day at Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art. The engagement took a turn for the bizarre when Liljeroth was invited by artist Makode Linde to cut into [...]
Colorado Academic Center Institutes Censorship Regime After Controversy Over Student Art Work
Until a few weeks ago, the Arts Building at the Aurari Higher Education Center in Denver featured several walls emblazoned with the kindly decree to “Post Artwork Here.” However, in light of recent controversy over the graphic work that student Estee Fox hung on one of these walls, the “authorities” (that blissfully meaningless blanket term) have rechristened these areas as [...]
Art Succeeds in Starting a Conversation, But Some Call for the Cancellation of the Project
Update: Lawrence, KS officials have banned the project, saying the proposed art installation would amount to animal cruelty. The Kansas code allows “with respect to farm animals” for “normal or accepted practices of animal husbandry, including the normal and accepted practices for the slaughter of such animals for food or by-products and the careful or thrifty management of one's herd [...]
Art Censorship in 2011: Nudity, Sexuality, Religion, Politics, and… Meat?!
2012 has already brought a few cases of censored art to our attention: Microsoft Skydrive froze UK blogger Michael Ohajuru's storage account because Modigliani’s painting “Reclining Nude” violated Microsoft's Code of Conduct which prohibits images that “depict nudity of any sort”; and ?zmir Metropolitan Municipality removed three photographs (below) from the exhibition “Aykiri” (Contrary) at the Izmir Art Center in Turkey as they reportedly [...]
Christian Extremists Vandalize Art — Again and Again
Last October we reported about an incident at the Loveland Museum/Gallery in Colorado where a woman ripped into a lithograph after she busted the artwork’s plexiglass case with a crowbar. She did this because God told her to do it. In her explanation of the vandalism, Kathleen Folden refers to the similar destruction of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in Australia [...]
WEAR IT PROUD
Button brought back from the March 2011 Culture Wars symposium with the Corcoran and Transformer DC.
In Censoring Art Gainesville State College President Violates Academic Freedom
Stanley Bermudez' Heritage? (above) had been displayed for just over two weeks at the Gainesville State College Gallery before Martha Nesbitt, the President of GSC, ordered its removal. The painting, which layers images of a Klansman and a lynching upon a Confederate battle flag, drew protests spurred by a post on Southern Heritage Alerts. The Heritage Preservation Association, which has [...]
Smithsonian Regents’ Response to Censorship Outrage: what does it promise?
In response to the national outrage over the removal of artist David Wojnarowicz’ video Fire In My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery following pressure from the Catholic League and Republican Congressional leaders, the Smithsonian Board of Regents formed an Advisory Panel*.
Policing The Sacred – College Art Association Panel – Wednesday, February 9th, 12:30-2 PM
Policing The Sacred, organized by the National Coalition Against Censorship, looks at the volatile relationship between art, politics and religion.In recent decades the tensions between these have become intense, evident in the American culture wars of the 90s, the Danish cartoon uproar, and ongoing battles over artistic depictions of religious figures, including the recent removal of a David Wojnarowicz video from a show at the National Portrait Gallery. The panel, open to the public, takes place on Wednesday, February 9th, from 12:30-2 PM.
http://www.nationalportraitgallery.us/
ARTINFO reports: After outraging the art world, several of its funders, and a giant chunk of its constituency with its fatal decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s “Fire in My Belly” from the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek” show, the Smithsonian has chosen to respond to its critics in a dramatic, and rather odd, fashion: instead of returning the work to the [...]
New Museum Opens – Museum of Censored Art
On Thursday, January 13th, a new museum opens in Washington, DC: The Museum of Censored Art, founded by art and free speech activists Mike Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone. Mike and Mike are the iPad protesters, who were expelled from the National Portrait Gallery when they attempted to show David Wojnarowicz's video Fire In My Belly in the galleries of [...]
LA MOCA – the false dichotomy between censorship and sensitivity
The familiar "he said/ she said" binary so beloved of the media has shaped the controversy over LA MOCA's whitewashing of a political mural as an opposition between those who define it as censorship and those who define it as sensitivity. Here is the LA Times: “Censorship,” some cry, referring to Deitch’s removal of Blu’s antiwar mural on the north [...]
Hundreds Protest Smithsonian Censorship
This Sunday, Dec 19th, hundreds of artists, curators, queer and free speech activists, as well as other supporters of free speech gathered in front of Metropolitan Museum to take part in a rally demanding that the Smithsonian return the censored video by artist David Wojnarowicz, “A Fire In My Belly,” to the National Portrait Gallery’s Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in [...]
NPG Censorship Protest in New York City – Sunday, December 19th, 1:00 PM
Stop the Censorship! Put the Wojnarowicz video back! Protest in New York City - Sunday, December 19th, 1:00 PM (details below) Send a message to the Smithsonian Institution and all of its museums: Stop the Censorship. Late in November the Smithsonian's head, G. Wayne Clough, did something unconscionable and shocking - he ordered the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC [...]
Art School Pulls Student Pieces From Exhibition
A photograph of a male nude by Savannah College of Art & Design student Nicole Craine was among the several artworks taken down before an Open Studio Exhibition at the school in October. Reportedly, the students were given no explanation as to why their work was taken down. College administrators later admitted that the content would be “unacceptable” for a [...]
20 Banned Album Covers
On occasion of the controversy over the sexually suggestive cover of Kanye West’s upcoming album "My Beautiful Twisted Dark Fantasy," Billboard has created a fun slideshow of 20 banned album covers. Check them out here: If you want to learn more about music censorship, you can check out NCAC’s Timeline of Music Censorship, which was created by former NCAC intern [...]
No no, a cartoon, naked man in it, no, Apple won’t have it
Take a look at this panel from an iPad graphic novel app based on James Joyce’s 20th century classic, Ulysses. There is a part in the story where a character, Buck Mulligan, strips down and jumps in the Irish Sea for a swim. Here it is in Joyce's original: He nodded to himself as he drew off his trousers and [...]
Fractured Fairey Tale
In one of the more recent public controversies to hit the NCAC’s arts advocacy radar, two murals from a series commissioned for a Cincinnati Arts Center (CAC) exhibition were recently destroyed – one vandalized by unknown actors, the other whitewashed by a disgruntled site owner. The two murals, by former street artist Shepard Fairey (whose best known images include the [...]
Tampon photo incites controversy at the Fashion Institute
“FIT endorses the right of artists to freely express their views through their work” reads a sign at the beginning of a student photography show on display in one of the institute’s lobbies. The sign also warns that artwork may be inappropriate for some people. That didn’t stop the Dean from requesting that a photograph by Jessica Chow be covered [...]
Good intentions – dire consequences: US v. Stevens
Which of these images would also be illegal if a 1999 law, heard on October 6, 2009 by the US Supreme Court, were to be upheld? Remember – we are talking about images, not the acts themselves. video from circus companies showing workers hooking elephants and striking tigers; footage from factory farms where farmers are beating sick turkeys to death [...]
NCAC Files Brief in U.S. v. Stevens, Urging Supreme Court to Reject “Invitation to Censorship”
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week in an important Supreme Court free speech case, NCAC, joined by the College Art Association, warned that a law banning depictions of animal cruelty violates the First Amendment right to free speech, and the exemption it provides for work with “serious value” rings hollow, given the long history of censorship of disturbing or unpopular [...]
Kirk’s ass, and censorship in the arts.
slurkflickr's commentary on cleaning up her own artwork: So as a general rule, my relationship with DC Comics when I worked on "Star Trek TOS" was pretty great. I had a fantastic editor, Margaret Clark, and I even got a decent inker once or twice- rare for a relatively new penciller. However, there was this one time when I was [...]
Provost of UNCW resigns, short tenure overshadowed by censorship
Brian Chapman, Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, resigned this week after a less than a year-long tenure. The resignation came shortly after the UNCW Faculty Senate passed a motion admonishing the UNCW administration for not consulting with the Women's Resource Center, Faculty Senate Steering Committee and other interested parties before requesting [...]
BGSU art censorship update
In an email to faculty today BGSU Interim Provost Mark Gromko stated that “the piece was initially removed so that […] legal review could occur.” Apparently BGSU administrators were wondering whether “the sculpture constituted child pornography or breached restrictions on depictions of child abuse under Ohio law.” As is easy to ascertain, child pornography and depictions of child abuse both [...]