The "NEA Four", Karen Finley

Karen Finley

Karen Finley is an American performance artist, whose theatrical pieces and recordings have often been labelled "obscene" due to their graphic depictions of sexuality, abuse, and disenfranchisement...

, Tim Miller

Tim Miller (performance artist)

-External links:* *...

, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes

Holly Hughes (performance artist)

Holly Hughes is an American lesbian performance artist. She began as a feminist painter in New York but is best known for her connection with the NEA Four, with whom she was denied funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, and for her work with the Women's One World Cafe. Her plays...

, were performance art

Performance art

In art, performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation. The performance can be live or...

ists whose proposed grants from the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 government's National Endowment for the Arts

National Endowment for the Arts

The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...

 (NEA) were vetoed by John Frohnmayer in June 1990. Grants were overtly vetoed on the basis of subject matter after the artists had successfully passed through a peer review

Peer review (disambiguation)

Peer review may refer to:*Peer review, the scholarly process of screening papers or grant applications*Clinical peer review, the process by which health care professionals evaluate each other's clinical performance...

 process. The artists won their case in court in 1993 and were awarded amounts equal to the grant money in question, though the case would make its way to the United States Supreme Court in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley

National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley

In National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, 524 U.S. 569 , the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, as amended in 1990), which required the Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts to ensure that "artistic excellence...

. In response, the NEA, under pressure from Congress

United States Congress

The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....

, stopped funding individual artists.