Decency and Display: Censorship in the Exhibition of American Art

In January 2025 law enforcement seized photographs by Sally Mann from the Museum of Modern Art Fort Worth. Days prior, this institution received an open letter calling Mann’s photographs made of her children more than 30 years ago “morally unacceptable.” Two months later, Texas lawmakers filed a bill to fine museums up to half a million dollars for displaying “obscene or harmful material.”

While the forced removal of art from museum walls is largely unprecedented in the US, these active efforts to control and censor the display of art have roots in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when art institutions and funding bodies navigated the politicization of culture and morality-based pushback from audiences. Moreover, these recent incidents closely mimic events surrounding the initial exhibition of Mann’s artworks, as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s among others. By 1989, everyone from New York Times critic Hilton Kramer to Anita Bryant’s American Family Association called for a reckoning of morality, decency, and the exhibition of art.

Looking to understand, question, and confront the history and current censorship in American art, this session invites submissions that address the following and related topics:

- The institutional, governmental, or public censorship of art

- The targeting, erasure, and/or banning of artists/artworks from public and private spaces

- Examples and/or threats of economic retribution against institutions that publicly display artwork

- Scandals connected to nudity, sexuality, and/or political ideology, in art museums

- The erasure of “controversial” themes and/or language in cultural spaces