Amid the current political attacks on the Smithsonian, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kennedy Center and higher education, I’m having flashbacks and a sense of déjà vu about how easily culture and history are targeted.
In 1989, conservative nationalist Senator Jesse Helms—a North Carolina Republican who opposed feminism, gay rights, civil rights, disability rights and affirmative action—railed against the arts and led a campaign against the National Endowment for the Arts. Helms and his supporters sought to ban federal funding for art deemed obscene, indecent and offensive to religion, race and heteronormative sexuality in response to work by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, the NEA Four (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck and Holly Hughes), and others. The move sparked a national debate about freedom of speech and expression, censorship, and obscenity and community values.
In the early 1990s, I joined the ranks of artists targeted by the religious right when I exhibited a series of assemblages called Post-Catholic Relics at Ohio University–Lancaster. The works focused on my experience, as a woman grappling with agency and identity, in the Roman Catholic Church. They were confrontational and provocative—a self-portrait eating an apple on the cover of a Bible, a piece comparing Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa to masturbation and another enshrining contraceptives as holy relics, among others. They sought to consider and try to reconcile the Catholic Church’s treatment of women, specifically myself and the women in my family. “Why were the roles of women limited to virgin, saint or whore?” I wondered.
