NEA’s Chief Rejects Grant to Boston Museum : Arts: An award is denied for an exhibit with sexual themes by a Los Angeles artist, despite approval by a peer review panel.

BOSTON — The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts has rejected a $40,000 grant to support an exhibit at a Boston museum by an artist whose work includes sexual themes, a museum official said today.

The Institute of Contemporary Art received formal notification last week that NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer had rejected the grant, which had been recommended for approval by a review committee, said Arthur Cohen, the institute’s marketing director.

The money was earmarked for an exhibition by Mike Kelley, a mixed-media artist from Los Angeles, museum officials said.

“It is almost unprecedented in the history of the NEA that an application for a gallery is approved by a peer review panel and then gets rejected by the director,” Cohen said.

The art institute’s director, David A. Ross, said Kelley’s work “deals with serious and critical issues in our culture, some of which deal with the pathology of our times, some of which deal with the body and references to sexuality and sociology, some of which deal with nationality and nationalism, some of which deal with madness and particular forms of modern schizophrenic behavior.”

Ross said it is unlikely that Frohnmayer will reverse his decision. He said he did not know why the director objected to Kelley’s exhibit.

Earlier this year, Frohnmayer rejected four other grants that had been recommended by review panels. Those grants were to individual artists involved in controversial works, not a museum or gallery.

Cohen said that about two-thirds of all applications submitted to the NEA are rejected by the peer panels and that the artists approved for grants are heavily scrutinized.

“This is a show about a very important artist,” Cohen said.

The NEA controversy began last year when Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and other conservatives in Congress objected to NEA funding of works by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

“They start with the easiest things first--photography and performance, where there is less of a historical precedent--and then they get down to censorship of other kinds of work,” Kelley told the Boston Globe.

The peer panel recommended the $40,000 grant after reviewing the Institute of Contemporary Art’s application for $60,000.

The Kelley exhibit was scheduled to originate in Boston and tour other museums across the nation and in Europe. “We’re going to do the show no matter what,” said curator Elizabeth Sussman.