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Gallery 16

June 12 - June 12, 2013

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501 Third Street San Francisco, CA 94107
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N.E.A Panel discussion at Gallery 16
As part of our 20th Anniversary Conversation series, Gallery 16 is proud to present a rare opportunity to hear about events that led to the turbulent period called the Culture Wars from those at the center of the debate. This is a unique opportunity to learn about the political, legislative and cultural maneuvering that led to the battle over Federal arts funding and the removal of Richard Serra’s Tiltled Arc. As well as the on going argument over of Federal support of the Arts. Our panel will include former US Congressman Pat Williams, artist and former Director of the NEA Visual Arts program Jim Melchert and Renny Pritikin, Former Director of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Lovers of the arts today may not recall the perilous future the National Endowment For The Arts faced back in the late 80’s and early 90’s, but it was close to extinction. Today we are reminded that the forces that sought to dismantle the NEA in the 90’s are still at work. This past November, a condensed version of David Wojanrowitz film A Fire in My Belly was removed from the exhibit Hide/Seek: Diöerence and Desire in American Portraiture” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in response to complaints from Representative John Boehner, who had neither seen the video or the exhibition. Artist Jim Melchert’s influential and varied career has taken many forms. He has degrees from Princeton, University of Chicago and studied under Peter Voulkos at the University of California, Berkeley where he became a professor. In 1977 the National Endowment for the Arts brought him to Washington, DC to direct its Visual Arts Program for four years. From 1984 to 1988 he joined the American Academy in Rome as Director. His work as a conceptual ceramic artist has led to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, the Museums of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston; at the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco, Tokyo, and Kyoto; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Rep. Pat Williams served as Chairman of the House Committee that oversaw fiscal authorization for the NEA. He was one of the most vocal champions for Federal Arts Funding and has been credited for saving the NEA. Pat Williams, who served Montana as its U.S. Congressman for nine terms, from 1979-1997, is well known for his staunch advocacy to save the National Endowment for the Arts. When the National Endowment for the Arts came under attack for subsidizing what some legislators considered sexually explicit art, Williams led the fight to save the agency. “As long as the federal government can support the arts without interfering with their content, government can indeed play a meaningful part in trying to encourage the arts,” Williams told The New York Times. “The genius of the NEA has been that the peer- review panels, made up of local folks, chose art and artists by using criteria based upon quality and excellence, never touching subject matter.” “He was a tireless and fearless supporter of the arts,” reports John Frohnmayer, who served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during that tumultuous era. “He risked his political career in doing so.” Frohnmayer recalls that Williams “called out the congressional critics of the Endowment for their duplicity and moral posturing.” Renny Pritikin has held three positions in arts organizations in Northern California over the past thirty years. For more than a decade he was director of New Langton Arts in San Francisco, an alternative space that specialized in new and experimental work in visual art, performance, new music, and literature. Following that, he was chief curator at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Until recently he was director and curator of the Nelson Gallery and Fine Art Collection at the University of California, Davis.Renny is a Fulbright Fellow and a Koret Fellow. He has published three books of poetry, most recently in 2007 from POD Press in San Francisco,and published dozens of catalogue essays, both in the United States and in Japan, and Germany. He is a senior adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts’ curatorial studies graduate program since 2001.