Highways, Franklin Furnace Receive New NEA Grants

The National Endowment for the Arts announced a $30-million round of grants Saturday, including $15,000 to two avant garde arts groups whose applications for other funds were recently denied because of explicitly sexual works the Endowment said lacked “artistic merit.”

The two organizations--Santa Monica’s Highways and Manhattan’s Franklin Furnace, another alternative artists’ space--have recently demanded access to all documents explaining how the agency reached its decision to deny them grants in the visual arts category and have charged the NEA with “blacklisting” their organizations.

Highways, a Santa Monica performance space, was denied a $5,000 grant in the visual arts category for the second quarter of 1992 because the application included slides of homoerotic works by local artist Joe Smoke. The NEA said the slides lacked artistic quality. But Highways will receive a separate $5,000 grant for the first quarter of 1992 to support two dance and performance arts series entitled “Driving Solo” and “L.A. Dance Traffic.”

Manhattan’s Franklin Furnace was rejected for a $20,000 visual arts grant for the second quarter because the grant application featured a videotape of a performance artist named Scarlett O. that contained humorous sexual material. For the first quarter, the group will receive $10,000 to support an upcoming gallery exhibition of books from Franklin Furnace’s permanent collections.

Franklin Furnace director Martha Wilson said the gallery exhibition, to be organized by Felix Gonzales-Torres, may include sexually explicit material. “I think they (the NEA) have a problem with performance artists,” she said, adding that such material might be less offensive to the NEA “in books.”

NEA spokesman Josh Dare said the announcement about the first-quarter grants comes later than the announcement about the second-quarter grants due to computer problems that delayed the report. He said that grants are denied in one category and approved in another for the same organizations “all the time.” “There is no ‘blacklist’--each application is considered separately,” he said.

The latest grant announcements come on the heels of the forced resignation of NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, which came in the midst of an ongoing attack against President Bush by his conservative challenger Pat Buchanan. Frohnmayer, who resigned Feb. 21, officially steps down May 1.