NEA Peer Panel Suspends Work : Arts: The ‘demoralized’ body protests the decision by endowment’s acting chairman to overturn grants for exhibitions that include graphic sexual imagery.

A panel charged with recommending National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for sculptors suspended its deliberations Friday until “the original promise and established procedures of the endowment are restored.” The move was in protest of the decision earlier this week by NEA Acting Chairman Anne-Imelda Radice to overturn two grants for exhibitions that include graphic sexual imagery.

The seven-member panel has been meeting this week in Washington and was to have decided on its recommendations Friday. Instead, panel members held a press conference and sent a letter to the NEA refusing to offer any recommendations until Radice agrees to clarify their role, saying they were “demoralized” by her failure to accept another panel’s recommendation on grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Visual Arts Center and the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

“We wanted to take the opportunity as we saw it to protest the autocratic and unilateral actions of Miss Radice in reversing decisions . . . to make a kind of visible protest to this erosion of a process that has worked so well for so many years,” said panel member Virginia Wright, a Seattle art collector, in an interview Friday.

“The policy, since the beginning of the NEA, has been to show a certain respect and give a certain authority to the peer panel review,” she continued. “In the past, overturning our recommendations has been very rare . . . the grants that she reversed were, in the eyes of our panel-- all the members of our panel--very mainstream, the kind of projects most museums around the country are involved in.”

Endowment officials were not available for comment Friday.

Other members of the panel include curator Susan Krane of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, critic Ronald Jones of Yale University, and artists Richard Fleischner, Mia Westerlund Roosen, James Surls and Los Angeles resident Daniel Martinez.

The grants process at the NEA begins with a review by “peer” panels of artists and administrators who make their recommendations to the presidentially appointed National Council on the Arts. The council’s recommendations to award grants can be overturned by the endowment chairman.

Both the MIT and Anderson Gallery grants had received peer panel and council recommendations for $10,000 each. Both exhibitions proposed works depicting human sexual organs and assorted body parts. The MIT grant was approved 6-4 by the peer panel and approved 11-1, with one abstention, by the National Council. (The Anderson Gallery was approved without a roll call vote.)

In a statement issued Tuesday, Radice denied the grants, saying they “did not measure up” to standards of artistic excellence. Her move has sparked fears among some elements of the arts community that the NEA has adopted a more restrictive grant-making policy due to pressure from conservative Congress members and the religious right.

Another objector to recent NEA developments was composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who earlier this week rejected his nomination by President Bush to receive the National Medal of Arts, which is administered by the NEA. And two organizations announced Friday that they would decline grants in protest. Boston-based Beacon Press plans to return a $39,000 NEA grant and Artist Trust in Seattle is rejecting two grants totaling $17,000.

Members of the panel in the Museum Special Exhibition category, which reviewed the MIT and Anderson Gallery grants, expressed support for the action by the sculpture fellowship panel. Judith Tannenbaum, associate director of Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, said her own panel would be drafting a letter of support. “I think we feel strongly among ourselves that the acting chair’s decision really does go against not only the peer review panel, but . . . the basic mission of the endowment itself,” Tannenbaum said.

Despite outrage from the panelists, some National Council members who voted for the MIT grant took a conciliatory tone, defending the NEA for all the “good” projects it funds.

“We may disagree, but I think she does have the final word,” said Metropolitan Opera soprano and council member Roberta Peters. “You all in the press zero in on these specific grants, but you have to understand what the rest of the grants have meant to the United States,” she continued.

Even those council members who criticized the rejections did so cautiously, and were quick to defend Radice’s right to make the final decision. Peter Hero, president of the Community Foundation of Santa Clara County, requested that the grant be subjected to a separate council vote “because I wanted us to be on the record” with the council’s approval of the project. While he said he was “disappointed” that the grant was not awarded, he added that Radice was exercising her right as chairman to veto it.

In an apparent attempt to defuse the ongoing obscenity controversy, the NEA also unveiled this week a new 9-minute, 45-second video to distribute to museums, schools and arts organizations nationwide, praising the NEA’s deeds and narrated by former newscaster Walter Cronkite.

Council member Wendy Luers, who criticized press accounts of the grant rejections, said the decision was “not the end of the world,” and said that the video represents the “real story” behind the NEA: “It’s boring, it’s not controversial, it’s just real.”