Error during command authentication.

 

 

"The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) joins the College Art Association, the Association of Art Museum Curators, and the Association of Art Museum Directors in protesting the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1987) from the exhibition "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution G. Wayne Clough ordered its removal on November 30 in response to outside pressure and the implied threat of funding cutbacks by several members of Congress.

As an organization of museum, academic, and public library professionals dedicated to the enhancement of information access for research in the visual arts, ARLIS/NA wholeheartedly supports freedom of expression and scholarly inquiry as essential to understanding and preserving our cultural heritage. We recognize and commend the Federal Government’s long-standing support of endeavors that have produced research of lasting value despite the possibility of controversy or disagreement.

This exhibition, organized by David C. Ward, an art historian at the National Portrait Gallery, and Jonathan Katz, director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, is a landmark examination of a topic seldom treated in a major museum, and it deserves to be presented without prejudice as devised by the curators and approved by the Smithsonian Institution.

ARLIS/NA strongly encourages all members in the United States to inform their senators and representatives that they support the exhibition, its curators, and the National Portrait Gallery."

Statement by P.P.O.W Gallery and The Estate of David Wojnarowicz

Posted on behalf of the ARLIS/NA Public Policy Committee by Roger Lawson, co-chair