One of the most exciting and important voices to emerge from the 1980s-90s American performance art movement, Karen Finley might be regarded as one of the country’s most noted censored artists.

As one of the four 1990 NEA grant recipients whose funding was revoked at the insistence of a faction led by North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms – whose description of her performance piece “We Keep Our Victims Ready” reduced it to the action of a naked Finley smearing chocolate sauce over her body, ignoring the literary content of her monologue about smothering patriarchy the symbolic gesture was a part of – Finley’s name will forever be associated with a United States Supreme Court case that not only prompted discussions of the definition of art, but of the definition of decency.

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