More Arts Groups Threaten to Reject NEA Money : Funding: New School for Social Research may not take its grant, but a Times survey finds no stampede to turn down assistance.

The New School for Social Research in New York has notified the National Endowment for the Arts that it may reject a $45,000 grant, while a Seattle arts group says it will turn down endowment funding--fresh evidence of growing concern in the arts community over content-control restrictions imposed by Congress on the NEA.

Moreover, a survey by The Times of dozens of artists and institutions found creative enterprises across the country increasingly uneasy about continued or expanded controls over the kind of art the NEA may support. The Times questioned NEA grant recipients--announced or prospective--ranging from authors and composers to small artist-run collectives and major theater companies and museums.

The survey found no evidence of an NEA grant-rejection stampede. Last week, the endowment’s theater program office persuaded two 1990 NEA playwright fellows not to turn back their money, according to the endowment and Marlane Meyer, the New York- and Los Angeles-based dramatist who was one of the two NEA fellows expressing concern.

In fact, many arts community leaders have argued that rejection of NEA money would play into the hands of conservatives in Congress led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) who have called for abolition of the NEA as an elitist frill that has abused the public trust by underwriting controversial, obscene and sacrilegious work.

But across the country, cultural institutions of all types are increasingly concerned about implications of the NEA controversy for their own creative autonomy. Some artists and art center officials say they fear being tainted by accepting support from a federal arts agency that may become--or, to some arts leaders, already is--significantly stifled in terms of the kind of art it can fund.

Threatened and announced grant rejections thus far have been based primarily on objections to the NEA’s standardized grant letter that includes language enacted by Congress barring federal support of allegedly obscene artworks unless they meet undefined standards of artistic excellence.

The New School, whose West Coast presence includes the Otis/Parsons Art Institute, emphasized that, while it notified NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer of its concern in a letter nearly two weeks ago, the decision to turn down the grant is not yet final.

The arts endowment declined to discuss the content of the New School correspondence, but confirmed that Frohnmayer had received the New School letter and replied to the institution last Wednesday.

In Seattle, meanwhile, the privately run Artist Trust, which parcels out small support grants to individual artists throughout Washington state, said its board has already voted to reject any NEA grant that is offered with restrictions on the content of work that can be created under its auspices.

Artist Trust has received verbal confirmation of its $15,000 grant, but is awaiting written confirmation before making its rejection decision final, according to its director, David Mendoza. Two NEA grant recipients--New York theater producer Joseph Papp and Venice choreographer Ferne Ackerman--have already turned down NEA support. Papp rejected $50,000 for his New York Shakespeare Festival and said he would turn down another $400,000 he expects to be offered later this year. Ackerman declined a choreography fellowship worth $7,000.

John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu and president of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, which represents 153 of the biggest museums in the country, said some collective protest among those institutions is increasingly likely.

Asked if one or more major museums might turn away NEA support or mount a strong public protest over endowment content-controls, Walsh said, “I don’t know which (museums) or when, but it’s thinkable. More than thinkable. I think it’s quite likely.”

In New York, a meeting was held Friday afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art to give museum directors there a chance to discuss in private the gravity of the political crisis facing the NEA. Leading officials of about 15 top New York museums were involved.

It was learned that the Friday meeting, which was not publicly announced, was attended by a cross section of the New York City museum power structure. Included were Richard E. Oldenburg, the Museum of Modern Art director, Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jennifer Russell, acting director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Diane Waldman, chief curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Sources familiar with the discussions said Marcia Tucker, director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, suggested her institution might turn down NEA financial support this year to protest the anti-obscenity language in the arts endowment grant letter. However, these sources said, other museum directors argued that rejecting NEA money would be “counterproductive.”

The museum directors, these sources said, voted only to consider placement of a full-page advertisement in a local newspaper. But Ellen Holtzman, managing director of the New Museum, said the institution had not reached a final decision and might still vote to reject NEA money or to accept the grant, but file a strong protest over the obscenity language.

New York playwright Lee Breuer, co-artistic director of the experimental Mabou Mines and adaptor/director of “Gospel at Colonus,” summed up the feelings of many NEA grantees, who reacted with anger, bitterness and frustration and the political travails the arts agency faces. Breuer, a 1990 playwright fellow awarded $17,000 this year, said, “The endowment is innocent, but it’s being bounced around like a political football--not only by the conservatives but also by the heavyweight cultural institutions.

“Let’s see if the Metropolitan Museum (of Art) accepts their grant. They can afford to issue statements. One should take the money and throw it back in their faces. This grant will give me more time to do theater that will insult (Helms and other conservatives.) I really desperately need this money. I have five children, I’m over $100,000 in debt.”

Three of the most influential cultural institutions in Los Angeles--the Mark Taper Forum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles Theatre Center--have scheduled discussions of the NEA arts-control situation at board meetings between now and the end of May.

The board of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) met last Thursday for what its president described as “intense discussion” of protest options, including outright rejection of NEA support. No action was taken and LACE officials noted that complete rejection would impose severe financial hardship on the gallery.

In Sausalito, the executive committee of the board of the Headlands Center for the Arts is scheduled to meet today to discuss its response to the offer of a $15,000 NEA grant. The Headlands grant is influential because the center’s executive director, Jennifer Dowley, chaired this year’s NEA review panel that selected visual arts program grantees.

“For us, it really is trying to find the most effective way of making our voice heard,” Dowley said. “We will be discussing what the response will be to our grant letter.”

“We’re all wrestling with it,” said Gordon Davidson, artistic director at the Taper. “I don’t want to contribute to the destruction of the NEA. But I really am on the horns of a dilemma. No matter whether we sign it or not, (it won’t) change what I do or how I do it. If I run afoul of the so-called regulations, then I’ll have to deal with that.”

The NEA is awaiting congressional action on two fronts. First, subcommittees in the House and Senate are working on draft legislation to renew the NEA’s legislative mandate for another five years. Separately, other subcommittees are drafting appropriations bills for the endowment for 1991. Conservative opponents of the endowment have made it clear they may attack on either front.

Richard Koshalek, MOCA’s director, noted that his museum has relied on large amounts of NEA support since it was founded in 1982. But Koshalek said the prospect of having to execute a signed agreement focused on obscene art in order to get continued NEA funds is disquieting.

“The majority of our board and the staff find this to be a very highly disagreeable clause and one we feel we have to constantly work to change and to have revoked and eliminated,” Koshalek said. Not accepting an anticipated $175,000 in new endowment support this year “is an option,” he said, but “for us to turn down these grants at this time would be untimely and premature.”

In New York, the New School declined to comment on its letter to Frohnmayer or to say when a final decision on grant rejection may be made, but sources said the institution is expected to make its move within the next few days.

Jonathan Fanton, the New School’s president, is expected to arrive in Los Angeles later today to officiate at Otis/Parsons commencement exercises. The New School is an internationally known progressive center with major programs in social science, communications, management and the arts.

The grant in question would support design of a courtyard at a landmark 1929 Bauhaus building on the New School’s Greenwich Village campus. The grant is part of the NEA’s design arts program, which had not previously been drawn into the controversy.

No aspect of the New School courtyard project includes elements about which questions of obscenity could be expected to arise, NEA sources said. But that such an individually unaffected grant has drawn the New School into the protest was seen as evidence of the issue’s enormous volatility.

“A whole cadre of people feel very strongly” that rejecting NEA money is appropriate, said Anne Murphy, executive director of the Washington-based American Arts Alliance. But turning down NEA funds, she contended, could be interpreted by the endowment’s political enemies as tacit confirmation that the work in question might be construed as obscene.

“If I were being honest,” said Murphy, “I would make a statement saying, ‘Everything this organization does has redeeming artistic value.’ I’d take the money and say the (restrictive grant letter) language doesn’t mean anything.”

There were these other developments:

* The San Francisco Bay Area Coalition for Freedom of Expression has announced an anti-censorship festival to run between June 22 and July 4 at which artists in a variety of media will produce or show works that might be construed as deliberately provocative under the terms of the restrictive NEA funding bill language. Many of the artists, organizers said, will make public their own NEA support in showing provocative work.

* The famed Los Angeles-based Bella Lewitsky Dance Company said it will strike restrictive wording from the NEA grant letter before signing a form on which officials must certify they will not produce obscene work. “We are striking the clause because we believe it restricts our First Amendment rights,” the dance company said.

* Playwright Terrence McNally, whose “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” was produced last year by the Taper, wrote an open letter in the new issue of the Dramatists Guild newsletter encouraging NEA playwright fellows to turn down their grants. “I wonder how these artists can live with themselves once the insidious process of censorship has begun,” McNally wrote.

The endowment said that, as of Friday of last of week, 15 of the 18 1990 fellows in the NEA theater program had returned their signed grant acknowledgments.

“I’m having a birthday party and I’ve invited all my friends to do something risque, preferably homoerotic, since I’m not allowed to do it any more,” said Lisa Loomer, one of the fellows. “I am thoughtful and troubled (over the requirement).”

But Loomer seemed to speak for many American artists and arts institutions, which have found that NEA support has become crucial in that last 25 years to sustaining new and emerging artists.

“I’m tired of people on both sides telling artists what to do,” said the Los Angeles-based Loomer. “The ones who tell you not to accept the grant are usually well established.

“Well, I don’t want to wait tables again. There are ways I can be expressive and useful with this money.”

Calendar writers Don Shirley, Daniel Cariaga, Joe Velazquez and Shauna Snow contributed to the research of this story.