David Gold Photography (some description here)

Nude photos ousted from art exhibit

The photographer protests that his two pieces were appropriate for display in a public building.

01:00 AM EDT on Saturday, July 17, 2004
BY JOHN CASTELLUCCI
Journal Staff Writer

PAWTUCKET -- The city has been trying for years to bring life back to its dying central business district.

It has, among other things, been trying to get artists to move downtown and exhibit their work.

But an artist whose work included a couple of nude photographs found there was no space for them in a city-owned building on Main Street.

When the photographs, Alina I and Alina II, by David M. Gold, were seen in the exhibit organized by the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative in the Benjamin E. Chester Building, they were ordered taken down.

Patty Zacks, president of the arts collaborative, said she had the pictures removed Tuesday, after she got a heads-up about them from an employee of the Blackstone Valley Visitors Center, which is located in the building, and concluded that they violated a city policy barring nudes.

"I told David, if we had a private gallery, it would be a different story," Zacks said. "But this is a public space and we have to be a little bit sensitive."

Gold, a business owner who called photography his avocation, is crying censorship.

He fired off a letter to Mayor James E. Doyle, saying he was deeply saddened that while American troops are fighting for freedom overseas, artistic freedom is being stripped away at home.

"I'm not Mapplethorpe," Gold said in an interview, referring to the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose homoerotic photographs caused a private gallery in Washington, D.C., to cancel a planned 1989 exhibit. Gold said that his photographs portray the human anatomy so artistically that no one would find them offensive.

The young woman who posed for the photographs, 18-year-old Alina, of Providence, agreed.

"These photographs don't offend public decency at all," she said. "I can show these pictures to my grandmother, who's in her late 60s. She approved of them. She said they were tasteful art."

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said he was troubled by the episode. "It appears that the city is engaging in inappropriate censorship of Mr. Gold's work because of generalized fears of the presentation of nudity."

The dispute recalls the controversy that occurred when the Rhode Island Foundation asked Indonesian-born artist Entang Wiharso to remove one of his paintings from the gallery in its downtown Providence headquarters more than a year ago.

After a meeting with the foundation's president failed to resolve the issue, Wiharso and his wife, Christine Cocca, canceled the exhibit. Artists shouldn't be stopped from displaying disturbing work, said Randall Rosenbaum, executive director of the State Council on the Arts. But people who enter public spaces to say, apply for a grant or pay a tax bill, shouldn't be unnecessarily offended by works of art, Rosenbaum said.

Under the circumstances, a compromise should be worked out, Rosenbaum said, with the organization offering to display the work in a space that the public can enter after being warned about what's on the display.

The Pawtucket Arts Collaborative isn't supported by the city, but it does receive city grants and gets to use the lobby of the Chester Building for free.

The building's lobby is open to the public, Zacks said, and hundreds of schoolchildren pass through on tours organized by Slater Mill.

Gold, outraged by the suggestion that he replace Alina I and Alina II with other pictures, is demanding a meeting with Doyle, as well as with Rosenbaum, Zacks and Herbert P. Weiss, the city's manager of economic and cultural affairs.

In the meantime, he said, he is withdrawing the other two photographs he had submitted for the art exhibit, and won't be contributing $100 to the city's upcoming arts festival, as planned.

"I shudder to think what the Pawtucket Arts Collaborative would do if presented with Michelangelo's David as an exhibit entry," Gold said.