CENSORSHIP REDUX NUMBER 2 (for Christina et al)

[Marty Epp-Carter]

Those of us who went to the SGC conference and attended the presentation titled: "Printmakers in Wartime" will remember Daniel Heyman who did the interviews with prisoners from Abu Ghraib. Daniel and I show at the same gallery in Provincetown, MA and I've seen his other work, (referred to below). I emailed him and asked him about his experience with censorship. I got permission to copy part of his email here.
The following is from Daniel Heyman:
"As to censorship, oddly enough there has been no censorship of this project, or none that seems obvious. When an institution is not interested in purchasing or exhibiting work, any salted artist can't honestly say that that is a result of censorship. The only times I ran into the censors was with sexually explicit homo work, and even then, one of the incidents was about pictures of naked men lounging on a beach, nothing sexual in it at all. But then again, nakedness is sexual in this country. Both incidents were exhibitions at college galleries, one at Dartmouth in 1991 and the other at Yale later that same decade. (To be fair, the Yale exhibition was at a Jewish study center, and the gallery also served as the prayer chapel, but I think that they should not have invited me to exhibit there if that was going to be a problem. At the time my work was full of naked men). The Dartmouth work that was censored were a series of 5 linocut prints of men having sex. But hey, men have sex, and it was a college gallery, where I had studied.
As to the Abu Ghraib and now Blackwater massacre work, the curators and exhibitors interested are very interested precisely because the work brings out a public discussion that has been all too absent during the progress of this very much loathed but equally ignored war. I haven't had as much success in getting the work out there in certain regions as others, but that might have as much to do with my contacts being primarily in the northeast. From time to time I get hate emails, especially when there is an article out somewhere.... its kind of flattering."