Three Decades After Canceling Mapplethorpe Exhibit, Corcoran Examines Its Controversial Decision
WAMU | JUN 13, 3:25 PM
Three Decades After Canceling Mapplethorpe Exhibit, Corcoran Examines Its Controversial Decision
Mikaela Lefrak
In June 1989, at the height of the AIDS crisis, staff members at the Corcoran Gallery of Art were preparing to open an exhibition of nearly 150 black-and-white photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. The photographer had died of AIDS that spring at the age of 42, and the exhibition, Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, was supposed to be a retrospective of his work.
The images were striking: Many of them featured black bodies and white bodies intertwined in homoerotic poses. Some depicted sexually violent acts. Through Mapplethorpes lens, these bodies somehow appeared as both static sculptures and living presences.
But the public never got to see them. On June 13, 1989, two weeks before the retrospective was scheduled to open,
the Corcoran canceled it. It was a decision that would change the course of the institutions future. (The Corcoran was dissolved in 2014 after years of financial struggles.)
The intricacies of that fateful decision are now on display in a new exhibition, 6.13.89, at the Corcoran, which is now part of George Washington Universitys Corcoran School of Art and Design. Graduate students pored through thousands of documents from the gallerys archives to tell the story of the Mapplethorpe shows conception, controversy and cancellation, as well as the community outcry that followed.
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