Micol Hebron, Associate Professor of Art, is a video and performance artist who has been making work in Los Angeles for over 15 years. As part of Wilkinson College’s 2024 Engaging the World initiative, leading the conversation on gender and sexuality, Hebron lectured on the censorship of art about gender and sexuality.

 

She began by discussing the history of censorship in art and the varied reasons behind it. Artworks have historically been censored because of what is perceived as sexual content, but also due to political ideology or its graphic nature. Many of these instances of censorship center around the idea of what is considered “inappropriate” or “indecent” within a culture. This raises two questions: who decides what is “inappropriate” and how? In 1989, the US Senate voted to bar the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the primary sources of arts funding in the United States, from supporting “obscene of indecent work” and, specifically, to cut off funds to arts groups that supported exhibitions of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The result was a massive loss of funding to artists, especially those from marginalized groups. This is just one example of how institutions have tried not only to censor specific kinds of artwork but also to sanitize what is considered art at all. Other types of censorship Hebron discussed include removing all or part of an artwork, covering or burning it, destroying it, blocking or canceling social media accounts, and banning it from schools and/or libraries. 

Hebron’s personal experience with censorship began when she was just 15 years old when a faculty member at her high school tried to paint over a mural she had painted about seeking peace during the Cold War, which was wildly misinterpreted as demonstrating support for Communism. The mural remained after lengthy discussions and debates, but the experience stayed with her. In undergraduate school, a performance piece she made as part of the process of grieving her late mother, titled Purse Vagina, in which she births the contents of her own and her late mother’s purse. When included in a show at UCLA, a patron complained, insisting it be removed. It was allowed to remain on display with a sign disclosing “Adult Content,” something she found ironic considering she was not legally an adult when she created the work. 

Hebron’s work continued to be censored, more recently on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook, where she has been shadow-banned and threatened with losing access to her account. Frustrated with the limitations put on art posted on social media, Hebron started to explore where Facebook would draw the line on “explicit” material. She began re-posting the images of herself that had been removed by Facebook, leaving it exactly the same but replacing her female nipples with photoshopped male nipples. While there was virtually no difference between the original post and the re-post, the re-post was allowed to remain because male nipples are not considered “inappropriate” or “sexual.” The nipple project, which has gone viral and continues to be re-posted today, serves as a kind of satire, revealing the ridiculousness of trying to define what is indecent in art. 

The censorship of specifically the female or female-presenting body is something that Hebron tries to challenge in her work. Labeling one type of body or certain bodily function as “indecent” carries a huge psychological impact, leading many to feel insecure or ashamed of their bodies and their normal functions. She advocates for the idea that “No body is inappropriate,” a slogan on some of the buttons she handed out at the lecture.

Hebron’s work also asks the question of why the female body is considered something inherently sexual and, therefore, explicit, while male bodies are not. Two works from her Domestic series, which are part of the Escalette Permanent Art Collection, bring this question to a point. In this series, Hebron photographs herself performing mundane, everyday tasks like watering the lawn and driving nude. Can these photographs still be considered explicit if there is nothing inherently sexual about her pose? Hebron argues that artists and individuals should have the agency to decide how to present their bodies, whether in a sexual way or not. You can visit these works in person on the 4th floor of Beckman Hall. 

We invite you to explore all the works in the Escalette Collection by visiting our eMuseum. 

Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences is the proud home of the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art. The Escalette Collection exists to inspire critical thinking, foster interdisciplinary discovery, and strengthen bonds with the community. Beyond its role in curating art in public spaces, the Escalette is a learning laboratory that offers diverse opportunities for student and engagement and research, and involvement with the wider community. The collection is free and open to the public to view.