NEA Panel Announces 2nd Protest : Arts: The group will suspend operations over the acting chairman’s refusal to allow two grant recommendations.

For the second time in a week, a National Endowment for the Arts peer review panel has announced that it will suspend operations in protest of last week’s decision by NEA acting chairman Anne-Imelda Radice to overturn two grant recommendations approved by another panel and the National Council on the Arts.

A panel reviewing fellowship applications for theater artists presented a letter to Radice Wednesday demanding that she reverse her decision not to approve two $10,000 grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Art Gallery and the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University. The exhibitions contain works depicting body parts, including genitalia.

Last Friday, an NEA visual arts panel that reviews fellowships for sculptors also suspended operations, saying the group was “demoralized” by Radice’s decision.

Beverly Robinson, a member of the theater panel and associate professor of theater at UCLA, said that the letter also asked Radice to provide written assurance to the panel that their recommendations would be “respected” and that Radice would not overturn their recommendations without “sufficient written artistic justification.” Robinson said the NEA denied both requests.

“It was too frustrating to think that we were going to go into a decision-making process not knowing whether or not the value of what we were going to do was going to be rejected,” Anderson said in a telephone interview.

In a prepared statement, Radice said she was “saddened” by the move, adding that individual artists would suffer because the $210,000 in fellowship funds would be diverted to other NEA programs.