Centro’s Show Loses USIA Help : Diplomacy: Content of essay is the reason given for withdrawing support from an Istanbul exhibit by the Balboa Park facility, its first abroad.

In another twist in the continuing conflict between American artists and the federal government, the United States Information Agency has withdrawn its support from a show of six California artists scheduled to open Oct. 16 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Sponsored by San Diego’s Centro Cultural de la Raza, “La Reconquista: A Post-Columbian New World,” will present politically charged artworks at the Istanbul Biennial, an exhibition whose theme, “Production of Cultural Difference,” was designed to highlight art by emerging artists from 50 countries.

David Avalos, Deborah Small, Richard Lou and Robert Sanchez, all of San Diego, and Amalia Mesa-Baines and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie of the Bay Area all have made works for the show, focusing, among other subjects, on issues of race relations in the United States and, in three cases, on border relations between the United States and Mexico.

This is the Centro’s first show to travel outside the United States or Mexico, and as such is an important step forward for the 22-year-old Chicano arts institution that continues to operate on a $350,000 annual budget in a converted storage building in Balboa Park.

The Centro’s show, budgeted at $88,600, was to have received $35,000 from the United States Information Agency, as well as logistical support in transporting the work to Turkey. The remaining funds were to have been provided by the Pew Memorial Trust and the Rockefeller Foundation. The two private foundations agreed to pay the full cost of the exhibition after the USIA pulled out on Aug. 27, when officials from the USIA and the U.S. Embassy in Turkey objected to the content of an essay written by Patricio Chavez, the Centro’s curator, for a catalogue to accompany the show.

With general introductory remarks about the art, the essay challenges assumptions about racial conditions in the United States: “1992 marks the 500-year anniversary of the European invasion of the Americas,” Chavez wrote. “Columbus remains a national hero in the U.S., and U.S. school children continue to be taught that Columbus ‘discovered’ America to legitimize a violent history of conquest and domination.”

Drawing parallels between the Berlin Wall and a steel wall recently erected by the United States at the border between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, the essay points to “exclusion in the guise of inclusion,” by the United States on immigration issues. “A truly new world paradigm is necessary for the planet and the human family to flourish, one not based on world orders or hierarchies but on mutual respect, collaboration and relinquishing of privilege.”

According to Chavez, the essay echoes issues raised by the artworks, but he submitted his text to the USIA with the expectation that some editing would be done before publication. However, when government officials asked him to remove his first five introductory paragraphs, including the comments quoted here, he balked.

“We are looking at the reality of people of color in the United States, from our own perspective, and questioning notions of racial purity which our society is built upon,” Chavez said in an interview this week, explaining his refusal to change the essay.

The USIA saw it differently, according to Rex Moser, a program officer in the USIA’s Arts America program, who helped select the Centro’s show for Istanbul.

“The statement that we wanted and expected to be able to make public is a curator’s statement about the artistic content of the artworks,” Moser said. “We never spoke about individual sentences or paragraphs. We told him that the tone of the essay was not acceptable.

“We did want a more balanced statement about the works as art. We felt that the text did not explain the context (of the art) as well as other materials that we had received from him.”

Chriss Winston, a spokeswoman for the USIA, said the agency’s art shows are intended to further U.S./Turkish relations, and she said that because “this particular exhibition would not strengthen those relations between the United States and Turkey, we withdrew our sponsorship.”

Ironically, the Istanbul director of the Biennial feels that the Centro’s show is fully in keeping with their theme. “Istanbul has a long history of accommodating different cultures--Armenians, Jews, Turks, Russians,” said Vasif Kortun, who has spent two years coordinating the multinational extravaganza. The exhibition will inaugurate a newly renovated 19th-Century factory, the FESHANE, as the City of Istanbul Nejat Eczacibasi Museum of Art, the city’s first contemporary art museum.

“I wanted to show, in Turkey, something they hadn’t seen before,” Kortun said in a phone interview from Istanbul. “A kind of art about digression--more problematic, food for thought. Art that was not noncommittal.

“Art in Turkey has been very nice and good and correct and very noncommittal for a long time. It can’t go on being like that. So, we’re playing with the definitions of art as have been conceived by people here. That’s why there are younger artists, not lots of big names.”

Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, was on a committee of art experts chosen through the National Endowment for the Arts to help the USIA select shows to travel abroad, and was involved in the selection of the Centro’s show. “I was not entirely surprised when the USIA reported having difficulties with Patricio’s essay,” Davies said, “but I was pretty disappointed since they could have known about (the tone of the show) pretty early on.”

In the selection process, Davies said, questions about the exhibition were more “technical, such as whether a small organization like the Centro would have the resources to travel the show internationally. We, the committee, knew about the content of the work and I raised the issues, but nobody really focused on that, and we were assured that it wouldn’t be a problem.”

Davies agreed with the USIA that the essay contains strong language, but said he did not see a problem in that: “The parts I’ve read are uncompromising and manifesto-like, but what disappoints me is that, even so, those statements should be so controversial or destabilizing to the United States government.”

This was not the first show that the USIA had selected to travel to Istanbul this year, only to reject the proposal after preliminary organization for the show was well under way. Prior to inviting the Centro’s show, the USIA had chosen “Invisible Borders,” a show organized by the New Museum in New York that included artists of various races making socially engaged statements from throughout the country.

Winston said the government’s objections to “Invisible Borders” was similar: “Our sponsorship was withdrawn for basically the same reason. We felt that the exhibition would not further U.S.-Turkey relations.”

In the earlier show, though, it was the artwork, and not an essay, that caused the cancellation.