Helms Letters Shed Light on NEA Tangle : Arts funding: Correspondence with National Endowment for the Arts chief John Frohnmayer suggests that the senator tried to influence the agency’s decisions.

At the height of last year’s National Endowment for the Arts political imbroglio, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) demanded details on NEA support to eight arts groups and nine artists in a letter underscoring Helms’ concern over possible sexual content of some of the work.

In a Nov. 7 letter to NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, Helms--saying only that “I am curious” about the funding involved--demanded detailed information on arts endowment grants given to those arts organizations and artists over a seven-year period beginning in 1982.

However, a newly released file of correspondence between Helms and NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer indicates that at the same time Helms was pressing his demands for details of NEA grants to arts groups and artists he targeted for critical scrutiny, Helms also attempted to intervene in NEA decisions bearing on individuals or arts groups he favored.

The letters are among correspondence between Helms and the NEA obtained by The Times under the Freedom of Information Act. They include documents that appear to confirm speculation--which first surfaced last year--that Helms identified arts organizations whose controversial work could be singled out as Congress considers legislation to extend the life of the arts endowment this year.

Arts endowment sources characterized the Nov. 7 Helms letter to Frohnmayer as a “fishing expedition.” Officials of some of the arts groups singled out by Helms charged the letter amounted to a hit list, intended to intimidate artists and galleries.

Neither Helms nor Frohnmayer returned calls seeking their comments on the correspondence in the wake of release of the letters.

The newly surfaced documents shed fresh light on the political tangle that enveloped the NEA last year in a months-long censorship controversy that created one of the most emotional debates in Congress in 1989.

The correspondence details, for the first time, an apparent attempt by Frohnmayer to strike a balance between maintaining an accommodation with Helms and Frohnmayer’s own attempt at damage control.

In one letter, Helms writes that he enjoyed meeting Frohnmayer’s “lovely wife,” Leah, at a Washington reception. In his reply, Frohnmayer scrawls at the bottom of the page: “Best wishes for the New Year.”

But cautiously in the last week, Frohnmayer has shown the first signs of a strategy apparently intended to reestablish the NEA as a champion of artistic expression. In remarks prepared for delivery late last week in Boston, Frohnmayer unveiled publicly a new defense of federal support for the arts he reportedly tested in an address a week before to a meeting of NEA employees.

“As the Berlin Wall crumbles and artists in Eastern Bloc nations are free to openly produce alternative politically oriented art for the first time in decades,” Frohnmayer said, “it is ironic that we in the free and democratic United States are debating the issue of censorship and artistic expression.

“All points of view expressed in excellent art should be encouraged and supported, and grants should not be proscribed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

The Helms-Frohnmayer letters show that Helms, on Nov. 24, attempted to press his own nominee for the office of NEA general counsel on Frohnmayer--to the point of urging a job interview for the candidate. Frohnmayer granted the interview, but then hired Julie Davis, a former law associate from his hometown of Portland, Ore.

In the letter urging the hiring of Edward Damich, a George Mason University law professor, as the endowment’s chief lawyer, Helms reminded Frohnmayer that the senator remained conspicuously silent at the height of a crisis that developed in early November. The crisis took form when Frohnmayer canceled a $10,000 grant to an AIDS art show in New York, saying the show was too “political,” but then changed his mind and restored the money after a storm of controversy.

The episode prompted widespread criticism of Frohnmayer’s handling of the situation and resulted in embarrassment to President Bush when famed conductor Leonard Bernstein declined to accept the National Medal of Arts--which Bush was to present at a White House ceremony--as a protest of Frohnmayer’s NEA’s action. The grant involved Artists Space, a Manhattan gallery, and a show titled “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.”

“The media called my office constantly . . . in the obvious hope that I would say something that would exacerbate your situation,” Helms wrote to Frohnmayer on Nov. 24. “I took none of the calls, and instructed my staff to say that you had talked with me in good faith and that I would not help them (the media) stir the pot.”

On Dec. 1, Helms wrote the arts endowment again, to “respectfully request” that “every possible consideration” be given to an application for a $12,500 grant to the Sawtooth Center for Visual Design, a small adult art-education organization in Winston-Salem, N.C. Ten days ago, an endowment official responded, informing Helms that the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s advisory board, would vote on the grant application during a three-day meeting scheduled to begin Friday morning.

It is in the initial letter from Nov. 7, however, that Helms appears to identify specific artists and organizations as targets. NEA sources said the endowment receives as many as 150 letters a week from members of Congress and their staffs and that many of Helms’ letters are no different from routine communications from throughout the Congress. But these sources said the letter demanding details of specific grants has almost a unique character and represents a route of attack with little precedent.

It includes a demand for detailed information on grants to Artists Space and seven other organizations. In his letter, Helms characterizes the Artists Space AIDS show as something “containing sexually explicit homosexual photographs.” The remaining groups include:

* Project Artaud, a multi-media San Francisco arts agency that operates its own gallery and theater divisions; the Center on Contemporary Art, a Seattle multi-media group; Allied Arts of Seattle, and ReSearch Publications, a San Francisco organization that receives no NEA support. The four organizations were involved in development of a show titled “Modern Primitives” that featured tattooing and body decoration of a variety of subcultures. The show included some materials focusing on body-piercing--including piercing of genital organs. Allied Arts also sponsored a panel discussion of censorship.

* The List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. The List gallery organized a show called “Trouble in Paradise” that emphasized political and social commentary in a variety of media by 14 New England artists--including work dealing with censorship, AIDS, homelessness, destruction of the American flag, domestic violence and drug abuse. One of the show’s most provocative works was a piece by artist Jay Critchley called “Old Glory Condom Corp.” The work included an appeal by Critchley to President Bush “to head a public/private partnership” to attack AIDS.

* Art Matters, Inc., a New York-based national foundation that funds artists working with difficult subject matter. Two of the organization’s top officials were key organizers of a program last year called Visual AIDS, a nationwide observance in which galleries and museums closed or presented special programs to call attention to the AIDS crisis. “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” was one of the key elements in the Visual AIDS program. Art Matters receives no federal funding.

* The Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., chapter of the American Institute of Architects, which sponsored a competition to design imaginative housing for the underprivileged. Helms noted that the contest was conducted in cooperation with Habitat--a Christian housing-advocacy group whose supporters include former President Jimmy Carter. Kenn Gardner, the organization’s chairman, initially said he was puzzled about why the housing design contest had attracted Helms’ attention.

Later, however, Gardner and officials of the Durham Arts Council noted that the housing competition’s entries were on public display in Durham on the same night and in the same building as a lecture by an official of the Winston-Salem-based Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA).

The lecture--sponsored by a local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union--featured homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and a reprint of an image of a crucifix immersed in urine. The latter photograph was included in a SECCA-sponsored show that became the subject of repeated attacks by Helms. Gardner speculated that whoever called Helms’ attention to the housing-design contest may simply have misconstrued it as a part of the lecture on provocative art. Gardner said the architects group received a total of $1,135 from the North Carolina Arts Council, a sum the arts council said included no funds directly supplied by the NEA.

Nine individual artists were also named by Helms in the Nov. 7 letter to Frohnmayer. Nearly all of the artists appeared to have been picked because they were involved in the shows and programs in question.

Officials of the arts groups reacted to confirmation of the existence of the Helms letters with concern. “What Sen. Helms, specifically, is doing by making these kinds of requests and putting organizations under this kind of scrutiny is making the whole process of funding political, which is scary,” said Susan Wyatt, director of Artists Space.

“It creates an environment of self-censorship and it sets Sen. Helms up as a kind of policeman for the art world. He’s not someone who, from what I can determine, is really interested in the art itself. What he seems to be doing is using and misusing art for political purposes.

“It intimidates people. Artists don’t wish to be used as political tools. If we believe in freedom of speech and expression in this country, we can’t have that kind of intimidation happening.”

Dana Friis-Hansen, curator of MIT’s List gallery, said the university underwrote the entire cost of the “Trouble in Paradise” show. “Before this whole thing blew up, we would probably have gone to the NEA with a proposal to do a show of political art from New England,” Friis-Hansen said.

“Now, we would not consider trying to fund it through the NEA. We used to think the NEA was a place where more controversial and difficult art would find appreciation. But when that process is interfered with, (NEA selection panelists) will start being cautious because they fear their decisions could be meddled with. It’s an effect that sort of trickles down.”