The Daily News
Wednesday April 25, 2001

Mural Modesty
After complaint, artist adds loincloth to nude
figure of Jesus

By Paul Moses, Staff Writer

An artist is painting a loincloth over a nude figure of the crucified Jesus in a massive mural at Kennedy Airport after construction workers complained about it, officials said yesterday. The figure’s nudity has prompted a worker at the airport’s new international arrivals facility to contact the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a group that raised an outcry in February over a photograph depicting a nude female Jesus at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The mural’s artist, Deborah Masters, did not return phone calls to her home in Brooklyn.
David Sigman, development general manager for JFKIAT, builder and operator of the $1.4 billion Terminal 4, said Masters readily agreed to change the mural when told that some workers had been offended.
“We didn’t bring it before the mayor’s panel,” he said with a chuckle, referring to an advisory committee Mayer Rudolph Giuliani established earlier this month to set a “decency standard” for art in city-funded museums.
Lee Silberstein, a spokesman for the development company, said the exhibit, a striking colorful series of 28 sculpted reliefs that extends 300 feet, is privately funded. Since the artist agreed to make the change, company officials said, censorship did not become an issue.
The incident highlights the heightened tension stemming from Giuliani’s two highly publicized battles with the Brooklyn Museum over art he said was anti-Catholic.
In 1999, he tried unsuccessfully to evict the museum from its city-owned building because it exhibited a painting of the Virgin Mary that included clumps of elephant dung and cut-out pictures of women’s genitalia. After the museum exhibited Renee Cox’s photograph “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” which featured the artist nude in Jesus’ role, the mayor created a review panel that critics said could have a chilling effect on arts in the nation’s culture capital.
Catholic League director William Donohue, who had led the attacks on the two Brooklyn Museum exhibits but opposed the mayor’s creation of a review committee, praised the response to complaints about the airport art.
“I think that the officials involved and the artist are to be commended for listening to reason,” he said. “Too often in these controversies, we get an either-or option. Either it’s academic freedom or its authoritarianism,”
Masters’ 8-by-10 reliefs, to be unveiled when the terminal opens in May, depict city street scenes and were meant to brighten the area where airline passengers wait to clear immigration. The one that was changed depicts a botanica and shows religious items such as a statue of Mary, candles and the crucifix. The image of Jesus is a small part of the mural, about 18 inches tall.
Officials at the company, which the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey selected to run the terminal, were clearly concerned at the prospect of battling with the Catholic League. An executive of the nonprofit group had contacted the company last week and said he considered this “a very serious matter,” a company official said.
Art consultant Wendy Feuer, who formerly headed the MTA’s arts program, said that when she told Masters of the workers’ complaint, the artist responded immediately, “I’ll be out there tomorrow.”