Two Museums to Protest NEA Obscenity Oath : Art: MOCA and Newport Harbor Art Museum say they will continue to accept grants while objecting to the controversial requirement.

Two Southern California art museums say they will continue to accept grants from the National Endowment for the Arts but protest an NEA requirement that grantees certify they will refrain from showing obscene work.

The actions by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach were disclosed late last week. Each announcement was the result of a vote by the museums’ board of trustees.

The protest decisions are apparently part of a national trend among NEA grant recipients increasingly upset with the controversial so-called obscenity oath.

“Art, by its very nature, often involves risk and challenge to the status quo,” said a statement by the MOCA board of trustees released Friday. The statement said a protest letter will be filed with the endowment with each grant the museum receives.

A spokeswoman said MOCA expects to be offered three separate grants to support exhibitions this year. “Federal support through the NEA is important to MOCA,” the statement continued. “It is crucial that NEA continue as it began--as an institution that honors our society through the arts.”

MOCA also said it will stage a public letter-writing campaign Sunday at its California Plaza facility in downtown Los Angeles. The campaign, which will run from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., will encourage the public to write letters to members of Congress, with sample letters and congressional district lists available as resource material.

The museum said it will also sponsor a three-day telephone campaign in which museum supporters will be contacted and urged to write to their congressmen.

A spokeswoman for the Newport Harbor museum said that institution also expects to be offered three NEA grants later this year. One of those grants is a separate award of $20,000 to help finance purchase of artwork for the museum’s permanent collection, which was confirmed by an NEA grant letter several weeks ago, according to a Newport Harbor spokeswoman, Maxine Gaiber.

Gaiber said the museum may elect to strike out anti-obscenity wording in the grant notification letter and return a photocopy of the altered letter to the NEA with a form the museum must sign acknowledging 29 different terms and conditions of accepting NEA money--of which the pornography provision is one.

As an alternative, Newport Harbor might decide, Gaiber said, to send a protest letter saying the museum will guarantee to abide by all of the grant provisions except the obscenity section. If the limited agreement prompts the NEA to withhold the money, said Gaiber: “I think we take the consequences, whatever they may be.”

The endowment has not announced firm policies for dealing with grant protests. However, the NEA has said any grantee who refuses to sign the form attached to the grant letter in which the 29 terms and conditions must be collectively acknowledged will not receive the money.

The arts endowment instituted the requirement after conservatives in Congress forced inclusion last year of language in the NEA’s 1990 appropriation bill that prohibits federal support of obscene work unless it meets high standards of artistic excellence.

In recent weeks, at least two grant recipients have turned down NEA financial support to protest the restrictive language. And last week, the New School for Social Research in New York City filed suit against the endowment, seeking a court order barring the NEA from enforcing the provision.

Staff writer Zan Dubin in Orange County assisted in the research of this story.