National Association of Artists' Organizations

The National Association of Artists' Organizations (NAAO) was, from 1982 through the early 2000s, a Washington, D.C.-based arts service organization which, at its height, had a constituency of over 700 artists' organizations, arts institutions, artists and arts professionals representing a cross-section of diverse aesthetics, geographic, economic, ethnic and gender-based communities especially inclusive of the creators of emerging and experimental work in the interdisciplinary, literary, media, performing and visual arts.^[1] At the apex of its activities, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, NAAO served as a catalyst and co-plaintiff on the Supreme Court case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley having spawned the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. NAAO's dormancy in the early years of the 21st century led to the formation of Common Field.^[2]

NAAO emerged from the New Artpace conference and attendee directory held in 1978 at the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, CA.^[2] The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) began funding artists' organizations, artist-run alternative spaces and artist-driven initiatives in 1973 when an extension of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), began training and supporting jobs for artists working at these sites.^[3] The NEA's Visual Arts Program supported the formation of NAAO to provide networking opportunities (national conferences and membership directories) to this emergent constituency.

NAAO led the nation into the culture wars of the early 1990s by responding rapidly and pro-actively through its national network of community-based arts and cultural spaces to Congressional attacks against artists' rights and freedom of expression. These attacks included the ripping of images of Andre Serrano's Piss Christ on the floor of Congress, and led to the Corcoran Gallery of Art's summer of 1989 decision to cancel the exhibition The Perfect Moment, a retrospective of works by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. These attacks led to other incidents of arts censorship across the country, the inclusion of a "decency clause" authored by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) written into the grant guidelines of the National Endowment for the Arts and the cancellation of NEA grants due to content restrictions.^[4]

NAAO member organizations in 1992, as published in Organizing Artists: A Document and Directory of the National Association of Artists' Organizations, were:^[5]