A New York playwright says he is accepting a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts but will donate an equal amount of his own money to two institutions denied support by the agency.
In a letter to the NEA, playwright Jon Robin Baitz said he would give $7,500 each to the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University."I simply will not be complicit with faux-moralist sharpies of the right nor with psycho-sexual hysterics in the cultural sacking of this country," he wrote.
Acting NEA Chairwoman Anne-Imelda Radice rejected funding for projects proposed by the two arts centers last month. Both had been recommended for approval by two advisory panels.
Radice said neither exhibit measured up to the artistic standards necessary to merit endowment funding. Both exhibits contained sexually explicit material, but she has denied that was the reason for her decision.
The NEA has been targeted by conservatives and religious groups for funding controversial projects.
Radice's rejection of the two exhibits last month has prompted protests from within the arts community, including artists who suspended their reviews of projects seeking NEA funding and arts groups that declined to accept their funding awards.
Baitz said he was accepting his grant "without the least bit of pleasure. Being deemed politically acceptable by Chairwoman Radice is a dubious honor."