After her photographs were seized at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Wirth in Texas earlier this year in January, photographer Sally Mann opened up in an interview with NPR about how it impacted her second recently released memoir Art Work, along with concerns about the future of American museums.
Mann found herself at the center of controversy for a selection of her 1990s photographs of her rural Lexington, Virginia home, which included nude depictions of her underage children. Though they do not depict sexual activities, some critics characterized the images as “child porn”, even drawing comparisons to “pedophilia” and “child rape.”
The controversy, spurred by an open letter from the Danbury Institute, a conservative Christian advocacy group, in 2024, that was backed by some local government officials, lead to the removal of Mann’s photos from the show.
Though they were eventually returned to Mann’s gallery Gagosian, following a thorough investigation, and all charges were dropped, the damage was already done.
“I’m risk-averse fundamentally. And more so now,” Mann told NPR. Adding that she’s a “chicken” for not including a photograph from the 1990s of her two young daughters holding hands and peeing into the ocean in her latest book.
While a number of artists have certainly caused a stir over the years, none recently have had artworks forcibly removed from museum walls.
“We’re entering a new era of culture wars, I’m quite sure. And I think the people who are pursuing this are much more sophisticated and have many more tools at hand,” said Mann, who additionally indicated that social media is one such tool.
“Nevermind that Jesus Christ is portrayed any number of times in great paintings nude, and there are little putti [chubby winged children] peeing into fountains right and left in every Italian garden,” she said. “This is just stuck in their craw, this whole notion of what is completely innocent child nudity and they somehow sexualize it. … That seems to be the trigger for them, the nudity.”
Mann’s warnings of censorship come at a critical time when the Trump administration rolls out policies aimed at thwarting museum programs, which President Trump has referred to as “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’” The Smithsonian, for example, has been placed under review, with a spate of specific works being targeted.
“They’re not just reviewing the Smithsonian,” Mann said. “They’re actively rewriting history. And that’s terrifying. This is Orwellian.”
This concern has been echoed by sculptor Simone Leigh and painter Amy Sherald. Just this week Leigh told the Guardian in an interview that, “we’re now living under full-on fascism here”. Adding, “I’ve been thinking about the kind of art that’s made under fascism.”
For her part, Sherald spoke out about the censorship she experienced that lead her to ultimately cancel her exhibition “American Sublime” at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in July. In an op-ed, the painter explained, “Museums are not stages for loyalty. They are civic laboratories. They are places where we wrestle with contradictions, encounter the unfamiliar and widen our circle of empathy. But only if they remain free.
“If they do not, we lose more than exhibitions. We lose the public spaces where imagination takes a stand against power. And when that happens, the stories we inherit and the futures we can envision will no longer be our own.”
Lindsey Halligan, the lawyer spearheading the review of the Smithsonian’s exhibitions on behalf of the White House, rejected that characterization, however, telling NPR, the aim of the executive order is to “depoliticize our nation’s museums and ensure the Smithsonian presents history with balance, integrity and openness.” She added, “history is not being erased but shared more fully, free from partisan influence.”
It’s ironic, then, that Halligan continued the interview stating that Mann’s photographs should “never be in a federally funded institution like the Smithsonian.”
Though Mann has expressed some regret about the photographs she took of Black men, her work largely captures the American South she inhabits—for better or for worse. A lens that once pointed at her young children continued to take shape among landscapes in and around her Virginia home, including historic sites in the American Civil War, the site of Emmett Till’s murder, and her own husband’s body as he battles muscular dystrophy.
The future of these works, however, hangs in the balance as Mann reconsiders her plans to donate her estate to to the publicly-funded Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
“The ripples of this new regime are far-reaching, even reached to little old me. I don’t know what to do,” she told NPR. “Even if they held them and took perfect care of them and the prints themselves weren’t at any risk, the funding for the museum might be at risk.”
