M.G. Lord, editorial cartoon, Newsday, July 29, 1990
June 29, 1990: The National Endowment of the Arts announced it would defund peer reviewed grants to Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. Soon known as the NEA Four, the artist filed and won a lawsuit against the NEA and its Chairman John Frohnmayer charging the defunding was politically motivated. However, in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley, The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of the NEA decision making process. Congress soon voted to stop funding individual artists entirely.
In Cynthia Carr’s biography Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, she quotes Finley as saying: “[David] was a big supporter to me when I started having my legal problems. I would talk over the decisions I was making. And from my perspective, I didn’t feel that I had many artists I could talk about it. We had been friends before, but at this time we became colleagues. He would know what I was talking about, because he was living it. He gave me strength.”