Scenes from culture wars in Art Museum photo show

In December, after Republican congressional leaders fulminated and conservative public outcry crescendoed, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington yanked an artwork from a large exhibition called Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.

The work was a video distilled from a David Wojnarowicz film, A Fire in My Belly - made in 1987 at the height of the AIDS epidemic - that contained a brief segment depicting ants crawling over a crucifix.

The Catholic League denounced it, Republican House leaders threatened congressional-funding scrutiny. And G. Wayne Clough, head of the Smithsonian, the gallery's parent institution, ordered the video removed.

Censorship, cried artists, as museums around the country - including the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania - showed the expelled video in protest.

Now the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted an exhibition inspired by those events - Unsettled: Photography and Politics in Contemporary Art - that is on view through Aug. 21 in the Perelman Building. It reminds us that we've been in this territory before.

"I, personally, and the museum, as an institution, were disheartened by the National Portrait Gallery's quick response . . . to remove the film," said Peter Barberie, the museum's curator of photography and organizer of the show.

"Thinking about it, I realized that there are a lot of artists who made really compelling, politicized work in the '70s and '80s. They aren't always grouped together . . . yet they all shared a lot of concerns. And there was this politics going on [then] - not always about AIDS and gay identity, to be sure; there's racism and feminism as well. But I've always wanted to bring those things together rather than separate them out in looking at contemporary art."

The show features the large, billboardy feminist photo montages of Barbara Kruger; the tinted portraits of black people by Carrie Mae Weems; a Klansman portrait by Andres Serrano; the enigmatic imagery of Lorna Simpson; disturbing street scenes by Zoe Leonard, Peter Hujar, and Nan Goldin.

But the dramatic focal point of this small show is certainly a complete suite of Wojnarowicz's Sex Series (1988-89), a recent gift to the museum that has never been shown there.