NEA Won’t Fund Boston Show of L.A. Artist : Arts funds: The chairman rejects recommendations to support a Mike Kelley retrospective. The denial may be a case of mistaken identity, some observers say.

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts has overturned the recommendations of two NEA review panels and rejected a grant to a Boston museum to mount a major retrospective of work by Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley.

However, the turndown may have been a case of mistaken identity, said NEA sources.

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art said it was notified of NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer’s decision in telephone calls from the NEA’s museum program office Monday and late last week. The Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania originated a controversial show of works by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which has been the focus of continuing protests by conservatives.

It was uncertain Monday why and when Frohnmayer rejected the panels’ recommendations to support the Boston show. NEA sources said breakdowns in communication in Frohnmayer’s office apparently hamstrung the grant approval process for the Boston show. The NEA generally declines to comment on grant rejections and issued no official statement Monday.

However, The Times learned that the denial may have emanated from a controversial decision by the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s advisory board, to reject two grant applications to the Philadelphia gallery and that there may have been some confusion because of the similarity in names. Two peer review panels had recommended approval.

In May, the national council recommended rejecting two new grants to the Philadelphia gallery and the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, which is not affiliated with the Philadelphia center.

Curators and NEA grant panel members familiar with NEA procedures said they were skeptical that the identities could have been confused.

In August, Frohnmayer successfully sought reconsideration of the two Philadelphia grants, but reasons for the Boston rejection were unclear. Late Monday, the NEA released a statement saying only that the national council had voted to reject the grant and that “the chairman accepted the recommendation.”

Kelley, who has been described by critics as one of the most important American artists of his generation, has produced a large body of work that has sometimes strong sexual and scatological themes. The exhibition in question, which is scheduled to open in Boston in October, 1992, is to be a 10-year retrospective that includes some of Kelley’s most provocative pieces.

The show is also being considered for booking by the Newport Harbor Art Museum in Newport Beach, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh.

The Boston museum said it would produce the Kelley show as scheduled without the NEA money. (The museum recently was the last stop of the controversial Mapplethorpe show, which played a key role in an ongoing debate over government funding of the arts.)

Because disclosure of the grant rejection occurred close to an expected Senate vote on the NEA’s 1991 appropriation bill, the museum and arts advocacy groups charged that Frohnmayer had acted to block the grant for political purposes.

“This portentous act on the part of the endowment’s chairman appears to be motivated purely by what we consider to be political considerations completely inappropriate for the endowment’s mission,” said Boston Institute of Contemporary Art director David A. Ross.

“During a time when those who would urge the endowment to play the role of ideological censor have been shown to be out of step with mainstream American values, this move by Mr. Frohnmayer seems an unnecessary capitulation to those same reactionary voices,” Ross said.

In June, Frohnmayer rejected grants to four politically controversial performance artists who later filed suit against the NEA claiming political criteria were used.

Kelley could not be reached for comment Monday, but friends said he was upset by the decision. The artist currently has work on view through Nov. 10 at the Westside Los Angeles Rosamund Felsen Gallery.

“My conclusion is a question: Why?” gallery owner Felsen said Monday. “There seems to be no reason given for this. I don’t know what to make of it.”