New York, NY— Don’t Delete Art (DDA)—a collaborative initiative uniting advocacy groups and artists in the defense of artistic freedom online—will lead A Day of Action on June 15, 2023, in New York City and on social media. The actions are an extension of the DDA Manifesto campaign, which urges social media companies to update their content moderation policies [...]
Image caption: Taravat Talepasand, Demons, Dictators, Blasphemy, and Man, 2016. The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the College Art Association (CAA) have contacted Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to express concerns about how its campus gallery handled the controversy surrounding an exhibition entitled TARAVAT. The college's efforts to address local concerns have profoundly impacted the artistic freedom [...]
Photo Credit: Clifford McDonald, Good Trouble, 2023 The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) are alarmed by reports of the apparently politically motivated censorship of an art exhibition entitled "Embracing Kindness" at the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota’s Bradenton campus. Please see our letter attached, which outlines our concerns below: Click [...]
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and the College Art Association (CAA) expressed their deep concern with Arkansas Tech University’s handling of its on-campus exhibition, Artifacts, by artist Dominique Simmons. According to the artist's statement, Artifacts sought to acknowledge “the past, good and bad,” as it relates to the American South and included fraught imagery. However, the university’s museum [...]
New York - The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which represents 59 education, publishing, religious and arts organizations, and Don’t Delete Art (DDA), a collaborative project between NCAC and several other organizations and artists, welcome Meta’s recent announcement of Instagram policy updates that promise to improve transparency around downranking for the platform’s professional account users. The announcement follows several [...]
NEW YORK – Today, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC), which represents 59 education, publishing, religious and arts organizations and Don’t Delete Art (DDA), a project of NCAC and several other organizations and artists, joined the Electronic Frontier Foundation and over 50 other organizations and institutions in supporting Protect the Stack, a statement calling on internet infrastructure providers not [...]
Companies providing core internet infrastructures—including internet service providers, website host companies, payment processors, and more—rarely have substantial contact with their users, user-generated content, or user activities. And, even though they typically lack expertise, authority, resources, and policies to regulate user content with consistency, many online infrastructure companies do just that. The result has severely restricted free speech on the internet, [...]
Throughout its existence, NCAC has fought the censorship of art containing nude figures. Today, it is supporting the creators of the documentary series, NAK-ED, in their fight against body shaming. It is the idea that there is something shameful about the human body that leads to demands for art depicting the human figure to be repeatedly censored. The episodes will [...]
Facebook’s policy team has committed to convening a group of stakeholders to consider a new approach to nudity guidelines.
From defending challenged library books to promoting campus free speech to identifying nudity double standards on social media, here are a few of the folks we consider Free Speech Heroes in 2015.
Artists continue to struggle with Facebook's inconsistent policies on human nudity.
City officials want an art gallery to cover a nude painting-- but they can't find a legal justification.
You remember The Dirty Cowboy, our favorite book ban in May? School board members may be standing their ground, but they haven't heard the last of residents perturbed by the ban. The Patriot-News and The Lebanon Daily News both featured an Op-Ed piece by Annville-Cleona parent Tim White this weekend. White writes: "Although ACSD board President Tom Tschudy stated that [...]
We were able to chat yesterday with Amy Timberlake, the author of The Dirty Cowboy, (illustrated by Adam Rex). The book that has been at the center of a censorship debate outside of Hershey, P.A.. Two parents of a child at an elementary school objected to the nudity of the cowboy, calling it pornographic. Most likely hoping not to rock [...]
We were saddened to hear today about the passing of beloved children’s book author Maurice Sendak at the age of 83. His books, the most well-known being Where the Wild Things Are, captivated the imaginations of readers both young and old with their sometimes dark, fantastical stories. Because of the nature of his tales, many critics and censors marked his [...]
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 [...]
As blogged earlier this week, admins at the Marin Civic Center censored a painting of a nude female from an annual art show because an employee claimed it constituted sexual harassment. This morning, NCAC and the First Amendment Project sent Marin County a letter to show them the error of their ways. In it, we sought to explain that: [...]
The Marin County Civic Center has chosen to eliminate a nude painting by San Rafael artist Sylvia Cossich Goodman from a public exhibition. The full-frontal nude was accepted through what we can assume was a standard submission process, and was up in public for a week. So why take it down now? Because an employee complained it created "a hostile [...]
Susan Burns, the woman who tried to tear a Paul Gauguin painting off a wall at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., stated her reasons thus: “I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. [...]
Button brought back from the March 2011 Culture Wars symposium with the Corcoran and Transformer DC.
(image from artinfo.com) It turns out that the enclosure of the World Wide Web into propriety social networks like Facebook has a downside, as the global art community is discovering. Facebook's censors reviewers have repeatedly disabled accounts for posting images of Gustave Courbet's iconic 1866 painting, "The Origin Of The World", a frank and naturalistic portrait of a woman's genitalia. [...]
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*.
Earlier this year we reported on YouTube's removal and subsequent restoration of videos by dance-artist Amy Greenfield. At that point we voiced serious concerns about the lack of an appeals process for individuals who believe that their work has been unfairly removed from the site as well as the absence of "art" in the list of exceptions to the YouTube [...]
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 [...]
Last week, NCAC and EFF protested YouTube's removal of work by acclaimed video-artist Amy Greenfield. NCAC applauds YouTube for so promptly responding to our letter and restoring Amy Greenfield's videos to its site (there are still some technical glitches but we are assured these will be taken care of soon). We are glad the company affirms that creativity and free [...]
LIGHT OF THE BODY (segment) from Amy Greenfield on Vimeo. Google has taken a firm position on censorship in China, yet, ironically, Google willingly and actively censors. It censors so as to conform to local laws, but it also censors deliberately and voluntarily by restricting speech on, for instance, YouTube (fully owned by Google). A recent example of the breadth [...]
While the display of Janet Jackson’s naked breast and nipple during a 2005 CBS broadcast of the Superbowl may have been fleeting, the legal ramifications stemming from the incident are anything but. Last time we covered this case (here and here) the Supreme Court had vacated the Third Circuit Court of Appeals’ 2007 decision in the matter of FCC v. [...]
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 [...]
The latest scandal around Facebook's ban on images of nursing mothers, which show a glimpse of the areola or nipple, only presents us with the latest case of nipplephobia - an extreme panic reaction at the view of the female nipple (to my knowledge the male nipple fails to exert such power). Facebook's action was a misguided enforcement of its [...]
LOS ANGELES TIMES Friday, October 17, 1997 The first round of papers has been filed in a federal appeals court in San Francisco challenging the constitutionality of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. At the same time, the new movie version of Vladimir Nabokov's book Lolita, starring Jeremy Irons, is opening all over Europe, even though it is not [...]
