A Selective Timeline of Censorship in the U.S.A.

1989

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Ayatolah Khomeini issues a fatwa against the life of Salman Rushdie for the publication of the novel Satanic Verses. The U.S. Senate issues a resolution condemning Khomeini?s act and declares its ?commitment to protect the right of any to write, publish, sell, buy and read books without fear of intimidation and violence.?

A minority student exhibition at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago is attacked for its inclusion of Dread Scott Tyler?s installation What Is The Proper Way To Display A U.S. Flag. A group led by Republican senator Walter Dudycz, and including representatives from veterans? organizations, files a suit to close down the show. The Judge dismisses the suit reminding the court works of art are protected under the First Amendment. State funding for The School of Art Institute of Chicago is cut and many benefactors pull donations.

Legislation is introduced in Congress to prohibit willfully displaying the U.S. flag on the floor or ground. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Texas v. Johnson upholds the First Amendment right to burn the flag as symbolic political speech. The Flag Protection Act takes effect. Subsequent flag desecration charges are dismissed on the grounds that the Flag Protection Act is unconstitutional.

Rev. Donald Wildmon, director of the American Family Association, attacks Andres Serrano's Piss Christ in a wide direct-mail campaign. In response, Sen. Alphonse D?Amato denounces the work in a public statement in Congress. In a letter to acting National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chairman Hugh Southern, signed by 23 senators, D'Amato calls for a review of NEA procedures in allocating grants to artists. The letter calls Serrano's work "shocking, abhorrent, and completely undeserving of any recognition whatsoever"; the issue, it says, "is not a question of free speech" but "a question of taxpayers' money".

Representative Richard Armey (R-Tex) and one hundred other members of Congress criticize NEA support for Robert Mapplethorpe's retrospective, The Perfect Moment, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. cancels The Perfect Moment.

An amendment passed by the Senate would ban funding for the South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, NC and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia for five years, in reaction to their displaying Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe respectively. The amendment is eventually dropped. The NEA budget is cut by $45,000, which equals the amount that had gone to fund Andres Serrano and the Mapplethorpe retrospective.

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1989		Robert Mapplethorpe, Joe, 1978

An addition to the NEA appropriations bill bans funds appropriated by the National Endowments for the Arts or Humanities from being used to support "materials which in the judgment of the NEA may be considered obscene, including depictions of sadomasochism, homo-eroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or of individuals engaged in sex acts which taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." A federal court invalidates the amendment in 1990 as unconstitutionally vague and chilling the exercise of First Amendment rights.

NEA chair John Frohnmayer pulls funding from Witness: Against Our Vanishing, an AIDS-related exhibition at Artist's Space in New York. Following outcry from the arts community Frohnmayer restores the exhibition's grant, but with the stipulation that the funds could not be used for the catalogue.

David Avalos, Louis Hock and Elizabeth Sisco, Welcome to America?s Finest Tourist Plantation, 1998

The San Diego City Council's Public Services and Safety Committee vetoes a grant to Installation Gallery, a local alternative art space for its coordination of Welcome to America's Finest Tourist Plantation, a billboard project by San Diego artists David Avalos, Louis Hock, Elizabeth Sisco, and Deborah Small. The billboard contains the images of police arresting illegal immigrants and of undocumented workers in service positions.

Two California school districts remove The Little Red Riding Hood from their libraries after parents object to the mention of alcohol in the story.