National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)<\/a> fellowship had been rejected, despite the fact that an advisory peer panel had recommended it unanimously to the NEA. The National Council of the Arts, a group appointed by the president to advise the NEA, went against the opinion of these experts and rejected three of the applicants from a pool of 452 grants. Artists Andres Serrano, Merry Alpern, and Barbara DeGenevieve were caught in the middle of a political charade that infamously became known as the Culture Wars of the 1990s. Serrano had submitted works from his \u201cMorgue\u201d series, Alpern included photos taken through a window of a strip club near Wall Street, and DeGenevieve put forth pieces addressing female sexual desire. The committee would have none of it. All of this followed an earlier clash of artistic aesthetic autonomy versus government political intrusion when in 1990, the artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck were similarly sanctioned and their NEA grants denied for seemingly political reasons. The so-called \u201cNEA Four\u201d sued and won in a 1992 district court ruling that found the decency clause used by the NEA to be unconstitutional. However, in 1998, the Supreme Court overturned the decision. The stage had been set for the government to use political criteria over aesthetic quality as a means for assessing artist proposals. In these galleries, you will find DeGenevieve\u2019s work from the early 1990s that elicited the infamous decision to essentially censor her, as well as videos by the NEA Four artists that preceded it. After 1994, the NEA stopped awarding individual artist grants and put tighter restrictions around what kind of art warrants government support. This is still the climate in the halls of government today.<\/p>\n\n\n\nNEA Resource Binder<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Works by The NEA Four in the exhibition:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n