THE ARTIST XANDRA IBARRA was caught off guard by a text she received in February 2020. It was a message from a curator she was working with on a group exhibition opening that week at the City of San Antonio’s Centro de Artes gallery. They were informing her that her video in the show had been removed.
The 4-minute piece, Spictacle II: La Tortillera (2014), shows Ibarra performing as La Chica Boom, her burlesque stage persona. A minstrelsy of Chicanx gender and racial stereotypes, the piece culminates with the artist strapping a Tapatio bottle to her groin and ejaculating the hot sauce onto tortillas. Raunchy by design, the video is a gripping commentary on sexual and racial tropes.
Back in December 2019, the curators had submitted images and links for all the works in the show to the city for approval. Spictacle II met with no concern. But the city’s arts and culture director Debbie Racca-Sittre expressed disapproval once the work was installed, and the curators agreed to her request to place a content warning and curtain in front of it. Then, at the eleventh hour, “the video ended up on the desk of city attorney, Andy Segovia,” Ibarra told me over Zoom. Segovia “wrote a statement claiming my video was violating Texas penal codes and he deemed it ‘obscene.’”
This expulsion of an artwork from a small, provincial art space might have gone unnoticed had it not reached the ears of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s (NCAC) Arts & Culture Advocacy Program. They penned a public letter to the mayor of San Antonio, pressuring him to restore the work to the exhibition. The letter argued that “city-owned spaces are ruled by the free speech clause in the First Amendment,” and concluded that this means “government officials cannot arbitrarily or systematically impose their prejudices on a curated exhibition.”
The NCAC worked swiftly on Ibarra’s behalf, enlisting curators and the press to post online. Soon, the famed philosopher Judith Butler caught wind of the case, and, along with 28 other academics, signed a letter that lauded Ibarra’s work and cited its importance in their scholarship and curricula. The group insisted that the video had artistic value—which was important legally, because “artistic value” is one of the three main tenets of the Miller Test, used by the United States Supreme Court to assess whether speech or expression can be deemed obscene, and therefore, be suppressed.
The Centro’s committee made a unanimous recommendation to Racca-Sittre that the work remain on view, but she stalled the appeals process. Soon enough, it was March 2020, and while the ACLU had agreed to step in to help sue the City of San Antonio, the process halted as the city’s galleries closed during the Covid-19 outbreak. It was then impossible to reinstall the work, so the proceedings were curtailed.
FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS, NCAC has been the only organizationin the US dedicated to upholding the right of free expression in the cultural sector. The organization formed the Arts & Culture Advocacy Program (ACAP) in 2000, after the last of such organizations that had cropped up during the culture wars of the 1990s folded. This advocacy program succeeded the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression, which “went dormant,” recalls Svetlana Mintcheva, the program’s founding director. “They gave us their mailing list and goodwill. And then, the NCAC took over the work of arts advocacy.”
Censorship is the program’s number one target. While legally, in the US, “censorship” refers to the suppression of art by a federal or state actor because of its content, Mintcheva contends that their work requires a more expansive view of the offense. The San Antonio art space that restricted Ibarra is state funded, so that case was more clear-cut. But most museums and commercial galleries in the country are privately supported, and legally, they can determine what happens within their walls.
“A lot of people don’t see it as censorship when it comes from their side,” Mintcheva explains. “It’s seen as the right thing to do.” In the US, censorship is often framed as something nefarious that happens in China or Russia. But here, bans on books, abortion, and critical race theory from the right, and so-called “cancel culture” on the left, mean that with some regularity, artists’ works are being removed from public view.
Today, art that addresses reproductive rights and the Israel-Palestine conflict are prime targets. In March of last year, Lewis-Clark State College, in Idaho, removed works by Katrina Majkut, Michelle Hartney, and Lydia Nobles from an exhibition, claiming they violated the No Public Funds for Abortion Act. Starting in 2021, the law prohibited the use of public funds for abortion, including for speech that appears in its favor. And in March of this year, a portrait by Charles Gaines depicting the late Palestinian thinker Edward Said was briefly removed from his solo exhibition at the ICA Miami without his knowledge or consent, around the time of the museum’s annual benefit for private donors.
After devoting more than 20 years to the effort, Mintcheva is most keen to talk about the changing climate of cultural censorship in the country. “The pressure is no longer from conservatives and [the] religious right, who hijacked the argumentation of offense and hate speech that originated on the left in the early ’90s,” Mintcheva reflected. Increasingly, she says, “it is by people from disempowered communities that feel traumatized by particular artworks.”
Which means that censorship is happening on both ends of an increasingly polarized political spectrum, and the NCAC insists that they do not take sides. “We serve creative workers regardless of their particular beliefs or the aesthetic merit of their work,” Mintcheva says. “As an organization, we work based on principle regardless of how we, individually, feel about a work.” And so in 2017, the group criticized the swift dismantling of Sam Durant’s Scaffold. That sculpture, installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, sparked protests: the artist, who is white, staged a life-size version of the type of wooden gallows used in 1862 to execute 38 Dakota men in Minnesota. Durant intended Scaffold to comment on the historically disproportionate use of the penalty on people of color. The piece was slated to stand permanently in the museum’s burgeoning sculpture garden.
It didn’t stay long. A few days into the protests, the artist met with Dakota tribal elders as well as museum and city officials. After that discussion, Durant agreed to dismantle the piece and transfer the intellectual property rights to the Dakota people. In a public statement, the NCAC bemoaned the fact that this “hasty decision” by the artist and the museum did not allow for meaningful feedback from more voices, and foreclosed the possibility of other outcomes. Unlike the government-sanctioned suppression of Ibarra’s work in Texas, the artist himself elected for removal. Still, the NCAC denounced the proceedings as a missed opportunity for open discussion. “Artists and art institutions have always played a role in socio-political discourse” they wrote in an open letter. “There have been vigorous debates in recent years over who can appropriately represent historical trauma, the meaning of cultural appropriation and white privilege,” but there are ways to respond besides removing difficult artworks from view. “Cultural institutions and artists urgently need to develop creative ways to respond to such critique and controversy.”
THE DURANT INCIDENT came only six months after calls for the removal of Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket from the 2017 Whitney Biennial. An expressive rendering of a photograph from Emmett Till’s 1955 funeral by a white artist, the work made headlines when the artist Parker Bright staged a protest in front of the work, wearing a T-shirt that read black death spectacle. As with Ibarra’s case, various artists and thinkers signed a letter; this one was issued by Hannah Black and addressed to the biennial’s curators. The demand was clear: “the painting must go.”
“In this case, we didn’t make a public statement,” Mintcheva recalled. “Sometimes a statement by an anti-censorship organization could backfire.” Indeed, the charged nature of a censorship accusation could hinder the NCAC’s attempts to help an institution navigate tricky terrain. Mintcheva held discussions behind the scenes with then director Adam Weinberg, drumming up strategies (including signage and PR) that might keep the painting on view. That’s typical of their approach: when the NCAC lobbies, they ask institutions to respond to critics without removing the artwork in question (though to be clear, they are not institutional consultants). They insist that protesters’ actions are also free speech and therefore deserve protection.
Mintcheva sees exhibiting institutions as, ideally, forums for open discussion: it is often productive when an artwork, book, or event creates discomfort. “One of the key issues today is that we have an ever-shrinking public sphere,” she attests. With debate often regulated to the virtual realm, with all its toxicity and dehumanizing traits, she sees brick-and-mortar art institutions as having a duty to welcome moments of dissensus.
Amid it all, NCAC’s goal is to enable institutions to act neutrally and oppose censorship from all sides. The nonprofit does this work with funding from private donors and from the Andy Warhol Foundation, which has provided support since its inception. This aid allows the NCAC to hold strong to its one line: free speech.
But given that museums are built on selectivity, and saddled with colonialist and imperialist histories, is neutrality possible? Mintcheva answers the question by citing a published 2021 debate between herself and Laura Raicovich, a former Queens Museum director. Raicovich questions if neutrality is attainable when museums perform the “choosing” role and take a position by curating certain programs. Does curation equal endorsement? Mintcheva thinks the answer is no, and says museums should
strive not to endorse the ideas of the artists whose work is on view.
Not endorsing one’s own program—that statement flies in the face of what every museum marketing department does daily. Historically, to exhibit something in a museum is to insist on its importance, relevance, singularity. Is neutrality a pie-in-the-sky aspiration? Raicovich seems to have thought so: after all, she stepped down from her directorship in 2017, after she vetoed renting the space to the Israeli government for an event celebrating the nation’s 70th birthday. The event was reinstated, but
the resulting tensions between her and her board proved untenable.
Earlier this year, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco tried Mintcheva’s approach. In February, 8 of the 30 invited artists in the“Bay Area Now 9”exhibition modified their artworks in an act of protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza. The works had already been on view for several months. NCAC decided not to intervene, describing it as “a no-win situation” for the YBCA, since any action by the museum would denote partiality. In this case, the modified works were no longer what the museum had agreed to exhibit. However the organization warned that, if YBCA removed the works, it could appear that they were taking a political position. The museum responded by closing the exhibition for an entire month while they deliberated, eventually reopening with the altered works untouched yet accompanied by disclaimers, which stated that the modifications represent the views of the artists, not the museum.
WITH MUSEUM STAFF ON the front lines of these negotiations, itisunsurprising that the NCAC’s most recent hire is a former curator: Elizabeth Larison joined as director in August 2022. Speaking via Zoom, Larison described the particular “gray zone” that crops up when the NCAC steps into the curatorial process. For this reason, the organization prefers not to weigh in on whether a curatorial decision may or may not incite controversy and cries for censorship. Larison makes clear that NCAC’s purview does not extend to what a museum and its curators decide to bring within their doors: they step in only after a work or project has been selected.
Larison, who is a staff of one in the Arts & Culture Advocacy Program, spends much of her day-to-day on what she calls “case management,” or addressing time-sensitive reports of censorship that reach her by referral, or through a report on the organization’s website. One recent case was the retrospective of Palestinian-American painter Samia Halaby scheduled to open this past February at Indiana University’s Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art. In December of last year, the artist received a letter that the show had been canceled, with the museum citing unspecified “safety concerns.”
That case reached the NCAC through “three degrees of separation,” Larison recalls, speaking via Zoom. In January, she responded by penning a statement that urged the university to reverse their decision. In that letter, she attributed the cancellation to “the artist’s pro-Palestinian advocacy and activism,” noting that her abstract paintings are unlikely to be viewed as controversial on their own. Since Halaby had already put significant work into this presentation, the NCAC amplified the artist’s request to have the museum reschedule the show. As of this writing, there has been no word from the university, although a different solo presentation of Halaby’s work is currently on view at the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Responses like this one are most effective when they are timely, so quick turn-around and newsworthiness often structure the tempo of Larison’s days. Still, she makes a point to tend to long-term work. Most of that effort involves tackling the silencing that happens behind closed doors; here, curators are a pivotal focus. In instances of censorship, curators are often put in the middle of competing forces—the artists they want to protect, and the governmental or private forces that might put pressure on curatorial decisions.
That is why in November 2023, the NCAC, collaborating with Creative Capital, hosted a workshop with curators from around the country. The group discussed censorship case studies culled from the personal experience of participants, who said the workshop fostered an environment of openness
and intimacy; one, Janna Dyk of the Art Galleries + Collection at Goucher College in Maryland, said it “helped create a cohort,” adding, “if an issue were to come up, I feel that I could pose a question to the group or to particular individuals, to ask for support and mentorship.”
This past February, Larison participated in a panel coinciding with an exhibition at AIR gallery in Brooklyn titled “Free Speech and the Inexpressible,” curated by artist and writer Aliza Shvarts. The group show featured the three works by Majkut, Hartney, and Nobles restricted in Idaho last year, in addition to pieces by 15 other artists and collectives that have experienced censorship or made work addressing it.
Ibarra features in the show too: for her Ashes of Five Feminist of Color Texts (2020), she burned the five most-cited texts by feminist authors of color—including Kimberlé Crenshaw and Audre Lorde—then displayed their covers on the wall next to flowers, as if in a morgue. Her gesture is not meant to censor these women so much as to protect them from, in her words, an “economy of overcitation,” as institutions often defer to these texts without enacting meaningful change. Nearby, a sculpture by Diana Schmertz takes on Florida’s book bans: her installation comprises watercolor paintings of the covers of books that the 2022 “Stop W.O.K.E.” Act banned from Florida public schools; Schmertz engraved these paintings with laser-cut text from the Pernell v. Florida Board of Governors case, which challenged the book bans.
Censorship is a topic that hits close to home for the show’s curator: Shvarts made headlines with her own work in 2008, when her BA thesis project at Yale, Untitled [Senior Thesis], generated intense debate. The project comprised footage of a nine-month-long performance involving artificial insemination self-administered monthly, followed by consuming herbal abortifacients. The artist describes the process as “super long and boring,” yet it was also an early instance of “going viral.” The piece was ultimately pulled from her thesis exhibition and dubbed a “creative fiction” by the university’s administration.
Shvarts says her situation would certainly have benefited from the attention of the NCAC. “I was so utterly alone,” she recalls. “When I was navigating that as a 22-year-old, it would have meant the world if an entity like that wrote a letter supporting me.” She included a handout from NCAC as part of the exhibition at AIR, helping ensure that artists know about their available support.
If curators are on the front lines, it’s artists who are in the trenches. I asked Ibarra and Shvarts if either had experienced subsequent instances of censorship. Both said no, not to the same extent. But the incidents linger. It is soft censorship, Ibarra says, that she has met throughout her 20-year career. For her, this takes the shape of warnings that institutions often display alongside presentations of her work. Such interventions have led her to conclude that “the display of sexual content is still a profound site of anxiety in the arts.”
As for Shvarts, since her “terrifying experience” at Yale—which went as far
as death threats—she hasn’t made any more work that involves her body in such an overt way. Despite her now controversial reputation, she admits “I’m kind of a pushover.” But a strategic one: she knows that to give a platform to the issues she wants to address sometimes means making calculated compromises. “I really want to talk about these issues,” she says of her work concerning rape, feminism, and reproductive rights. “I’m happy to take into account other people and things I may not know about, like an institution’s own vulnerability.”
