Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment Trial

Barbara Holwadel is a newly elected member of the Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee. She ran for election as a reform candidate. Barbara will give us an update of the state of the Ohio Republican Party which is a follow-up to the class EmpowerU featured on February 09, 2022 on possible Corruption in the Ohio Republican Party.
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Hear from Dennis Barrie, former director of the Cincinnati Arts Center, and his defense attorney, H. Louis Sirkin, revisit Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment, the community’s reaction to the controversial photos, and the obscenity trial that engaged national figures and everyday Americans in conversations and spirited debate about obscenity versus art and the impact on community standards.

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Why the Jury Verdict of Not Guilty was Correct. When the Mapplethorpe photos arrived by truck on March 28, 1990, Cincinnati had a widely held and mostly earned reputation as one of the most conservative cities in America. Hamilton County Sheriff Simon Leis Jr. was waiting for the photographs. In his mind, the photographs were smut, not art. A collection of challenging photographs and difficult questions about sex and sacrilege, art and obscenity, politics and polemics.

The art show, titled The Perfect Moment, opened on a chilly April morning in 1990, and among the first people through the door of the Contemporary Arts Center were nine members of a grand jury who viewed the 175 photographs and deemed seven of them to be not just offensive, but criminal. Eventually, the question of what free speech is and what is too much would be heard in a Municipal Court room After a week of explicit and evocative photographs and expert testimony, a jury went into its room for what was expected to be a long haul and a certain outcome.

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