Censorship of visual artists and visual artworks in the United States did not begin in the 1980s, or even in the twentieth century. It can be traced back to early-nineteenth-century Baltimore, where residents were outraged by the appearance (short-lived) of busty neoclassical goddesses by Hiram Powers. (There are undoubtedly earlier examples, but I am no expert on colonial American art and such records are sparse.) Modern censorship emerged when the impulse to censor met a sustained public campaign. The moment was post-Civil War New York; the organizer was a young dry-goods clerk named Anthony Comstock.

Starting with a police-assisted raid on a bookstore that sold mildly salacious books in 1868, the twin goals of Comstock's crusade were the elimination of obscenity and the criminalization of abortion and contraception. The Comstock-inspired federal antiobscenity law of 1873 banned items "for the prevention of conception" and that phrase was quickly echoed in the "Comstock laws" of twenty-two states. As a special postal inspector, Comstock denounced the plays of George Bernard Shaw, instigated the arrest of the art dealer Herman Knoedler, raided the Art Students League in New York in 1906 for its use of nude models, and cautioned that "obscene, lewd and indecent" photos are "commonly, but mistakenly called art."

If all this sounds depressingly reminiscent of recent censorship campaigns fomented by televangelist fundraisers and by Jesse Helms, consider the political milieu of the 1870s in which Comstock flourished. As the commentator Bruce Shapiro pointed out in a recent article in The Nation, that decade featured the worst depression of the nation's first century, complete with bread riots and antistrike violence. Washington legislators were only too happy to turn their attention away from such matters to the "burning" issues of artistic and sexual morality. Plus Áa change...

As a columnist for The Village Voice whose beat is the politics of culture, I am astonished by the volume of censorship-related material that comes my way. A few of the more telling incidents brought to my attention during the week I outlined this article: in St. Paul, Minnesota, the publishers of Artpaper had to use blackout bars to "sanitize" safer-sex images in order to get their October issue printed; in San Diego, painted bus benches critical of civilian killings by police (produced by the artists Louis Hock, Scott Kessler, Elizabeth Sisco, and Deborah Small) were vandalized; in New York, Recipe for Repression, a thirty-second anticensorship TV spot by Get Smart, a self-described "ad hoc artists group," was rejected for (paid) broadcast by station WCBS, although the CBS affiliate runs national health-care spots funded by the AFL-CIO and return-to-environmentally-pristine-Alaska ads produced by the Alaska Visitors Association and paid for by the Exxon Corporation.

The diversity of such examples argues for a broad definition of censorship. The matter should be reframed to transcend the insistent focus on whether The National Endowment for the Arts ought to fund works that may offend some viewers-and delight others-by their assault on social constructions of sexuality, race, and spirituality.

What is constructed as history is, of course, a partial view; the time line that follows showcases the recurrent themes of sex, politics, and loyalty oaths. Censored/Censured, a recent exhibition at the Baltimore alternative space BAUhouse, points to other, probably more frequent motives and modi operandi. It included works forcibly altered and works ejected from, or relocated within, exhibitions, often for capricious reasons. Art objects containing plastic guns, images of dead babies, and a painted list of actual prison dos and don'ts (it was deemed "depressing") offended their censors on nonsexual and nonreligious grounds.

While the actions of individuals like those chronicled in Censored/Censured may be readily acknowledged as censorship, the same cannot be said for institutional or systemic censorship, which are so pervasive they often appear to be invisible. Such conditions include the difficulty women have in acquiring major gallery representation; the problems people of color face in gaining admission to-and finding financing for-art schools; and the marginalization of overtly lesbian and gay art.

For this time line, I have consciously stretched the boundaries of what may be considered censorship by including cases of successful resistance to proposed censorship (such as the 1989 NEA attack on the Artists Space AIDS exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing), censorship by institutions (the NEA's elimination of its Inner Cities Mural Program in 1973), blacklisting (the U.S. Solicitor General's official vilification of the Photo League in 1947 as a "subversive organization"), and demagoguery (the U.S. Representative George Dondero's 1949 equation of modern art and communism). The last, along with recent events, reminds us that certain actions create a climate that encourages the censors among--and inside--us.

Finally, my purpose in expanding the definition of censorship is to broaden a dialogue that might be framed by the question, "Who gets to speak?" Consider this time line simply a set of notes toward a more inclusive record.

The Depression and World War II

During this period of economic duress, artists unionized, the government created massive work programs involving public art, and the realities of class distinctions were visible as never before in the United States. Censorship almost invariably involved "class struggle" and functioned as part of the sometimes acrimonious national debate about the efficacy of capitalism versus socialism.

1933	Diego Rivera's gigantic frescoed mural, Portrait of America, commissioned for the new Rockefeller Center in New York, is destroyed because of its portrait of Lenin.
1934	Twenty-five artist employees of the New Deal's Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) complete murals inside San Francisco's Coit Tower, while a general strike rages outside. Four artists, Victor Arnautoff, John Langley Howard, Clifford Wight, and Bernard Zakheim, are accused of "Communist tendencies" for their images of left-wing newspapers and Karl Marx's book Das Kapital. -Paul Cadmus's painting The Fleet's In, a canvas depicting sailors flirting with prostitutes, is removed from an exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., at a governmental request. (Ironically, Cadmus's homoerotic images are ignored.)
1935	The Harlem Artists Guild is formed in New York to combat racial discrimination in the Works Projects Administration (WPA).
1936	The Artists Union (formed in 1933 and renamed United American Artists in 1937) votes to combat fascism by boycotting art programs of the Berlin Olympic Games.
1938	The House Committee to investigate Un-American Activities (HUAC) is chartered; among its first targets is the WPA, dubbed "a hotbed of radicalism." Eight thousand WPA personnel are laid off in 1939.
1939	The Relief Bill of 1940 excludes Communists and includes a loyalty oath for Federal Arts Project (FAP) artists. When the artist August Henkel refuses to sign an FAP loyalty oath in 1940, his murals at Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Airport are destroyed.
1943	Arshiel Gorky's Newark Airport murals "disappear."

The Cold War and the Vietnam Era

The official proclamation of the Cold War might be dated to 1946, when Winston Churchill warned of the threat that lay behind a Communist "iron curtain." Cold War art controversies tended to be characterized by an attack on artists as "Communists"-all leftism was conflated under this rubric-and artworks as "communistic," a term that often meant "modernist" or "abstract" during the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s the Vietnam War era brought antiwar-related protest into galleries and museums, whether in the form of polemical demands from the left or of police crackdowns. For the first time since the 1930s, overtly critical and political (usually information-oriented, conceptual) art was placed in the public view.

1946	The State Department funds Advancing American Art, an exhibition of twenty contemporary, mostly abstract painters that opens in New York and travels to Europe and Latin America. The next year U.S. Representative Fred Busbey (R-Ill.) denounces it as "infiltrated by Communists," leading to withdrawal of funding.
1947	The Photo League is placed on the U.S. Solicitor General's list of subversive organizations. Such blacklisting means that group members are denied virtually any chance of employment.
1949	U.S. Representative George Dondero (R-Mich.) addresses the House of Representatives and charges that foreign infiltrators "are selling to our young men and women a subversive doctrine of 'isms,' Communist-inspired and Communist-connected."
1953	Dondero attacks Anton Refregier's WPA mural at San Francisco's Rincon post office for its supposedly Marxist imagery. Arts organizations effectively rally to save the historic murals. -The artists Alexander Calder, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Ben Shahn are placed under surveillance by the FBI.
1956	Sport in America, a USIA-sponsored exhibition, is attacked by the right-wing artists group the Dallas County Patriotic Council for the leftist views of some artists in the show. Dallas Museum trustees vote to show the entire exhibition.
1957	Legislation to create an Arts Advisory Council (President Eisenhower had called for the establishment of such a group in 1955) is rejected by Congress after an American Artists Professional League member, Wheeler Williams, prophesies the possibility of a communist and/or modernist takeover of such a council.
1969	The Guerrilla Art Action Group removes Kazimir Malevich's White on White from a wall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, replacing it with a manifesto demanding that the museum close until the end of the Vietnam War, decentralize, and sell $1 million worth of artworks, giving proceeds to the poor.
1970	The Peoples Flag Show at Judson Church in New York is closed down by a local district attorney, who arrests its artist organizers for what he regards as Vietnam War-inspired flag abuse.
1971	Hans Haacke's exhibition about New York real estate ownership is canceled by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
1973	NEA discontinues its Inner Cities Mural Program.

The Recent Past

Government withdrawal of funding proved an effective vehicle for silencing anti-status quo voices during the first half of the 1980s. The second half of the decade saw numerous methods of censorship, from increased art vandalism to the rightist attempt to tar feminist, gay, lesbian, and minority artists as the "new Communists" following the post-perestroika decline of actual communism. That the final years of this time line are far more complete than the earlier ones reflects both the relative ease of access to recent information and the emergence of censorship as a public-that is newsworthy-issue.