Karen Finley started out performing feminist monologues full of vitriol and fury in the punk clubs of the Bay Area in the late 70s. By the 80s, she’d moved to New York where she was a regular at legendary performance venues like Danceteria. And then in 1990, she became a household name as part of the NEA FOUR—a group of four performance artists whose National Endowment for the Arts funding was revoked because conservative Senator Jesse Helms had a hissy fit about decency. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1998 in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley and Karen Finley became an icon of the struggle for free speech. She’s a professor of Art and Public Policy at New York University and in this episode of BUST’s Poptarts podcast she unleashes on the current administrations and provides creative guidance for feminists trying to keep our heads up in the time of Trump.
