Finley, Hughes to Receive NEA Grants : Arts: Controversial performance artists were previously denied awards.

The National Endowment for the Arts is expected to announce Thursday new grants totaling $40,000 for two prominent performance artists to whom NEA funds were rejected last year in a failed bid to placate the agency’s political critics.

The decision--reportedly reached last week by NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer--will bring to a nearly anticlimactic close one element of the ongoing arts endowment controversy. The content and timing of the announcement were confirmed by top NEA sources Tuesday.

Frohnmayer’s decision on grants to New York performers Karen Finley and Holly Hughes had been the subject of speculation for several weeks. While the announcement that the grants will be made is not expected to quiet criticism of the NEA chairman among artists, approval of the money will not further exacerbate Frohnmayer’s difficulties with artists.

On the other hand, the decision to issue grants to Finley and Hughes creates the risk of new controversy with conservative politicians and religious groups, who had focused blistering criticism on performance-art work by the two women last year. Finley’s work is strongly feminist in tone and Hughes regularly deals with lesbian themes and issues.

Frohnmayer is expected to announce Thursday that he will accept a unanimous recommendation by the NEA’s advisory National Council on the Arts--reached in early November--to approve the grants.

Last year, Frohnmayer overruled NEA grant panels and rejected unrelated fellowships to Finley, Hughes and two other performance artists. A lawsuit challenging the decision, on grounds that the NEA chairman used political rather than artistic standards to reach it, is pending in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

The Frohnmayer announcement will also include three other potentially controversial grants that were sent to a newly constituted NEA review panel last summer. The move came after The Times disclosed that artists with financial interests in five NEA grants were members of panels that evaluated the applications. The November vote unanimously recommending the grants for funding came after the grants had been subjected to a complete re-evaluation by a new grant-review committee.

The $25,000 grant involving Finley is technically being awarded to the Kitchen Center for Video, Music and Dance in New York City. It will support production of a performance work that “deconstructs” conventional TV talk shows.

The Hughes grant, valued at $15,000, is to support production by the Downtown Arts Center of New York of a work titled “No Trace of the Blond,” which explores feminist themes using subject matter dealing with vampirism.