Most artists who received grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities had already signed their contracts and were awaiting their checks by Monday, when they received an email saying they had one last amendment to sign. In addition to some minutiae about meeting deadlines, the document outlined new stipulations for provocative art.

“Grantee warrants that neither Grantee’s performance under this Agreement nor any tangible manifestation of Grantee’s performance under this Agreement is lewd, lascivious, vulgar, overtly political, excessively violent, constitutes sexual harassment, or is, in any other way, illegal,” the amendment read. The document, obtained by DCist and first reported by The Washington Post, goes on to say that the DCCAH will determine what artworks are out of line, and work that’s deemed inappropriate will result in termination of the contract.

A social media outcry soon followed, as artists claimed the amendment would censor their work. The commission awarded 586 grants this year, totaling more than $14 million, to individual artists for specific projects and to arts organizations for their general operating budgets.

“What really triggered me is that it’s at their discretion,” says Adrienne Gaither, a multimedia artist who is receiving her second grant from the DCCAH this year. “How can I advocate for myself?”

It took less than five days for the DCCAH to announce it would withdraw the amendment, as first reported by Washington City Paper.

“The Bowser Administration stands firmly behind our shared D.C. Values and will always strive to uphold our mission of service to the District and its residents,” the DCCAH said in a statement on Thursday. “The D.C. Commission on Arts and Humanities believes deeply in the right to freedom of expression and would never seek to violate that right by censoring the work of any grantee.”

The amendment came less than a month after a minor controversy over an installation at the Reeves Center on U Street NW. At least one visitor has complained that Marta Perez Garcia’s exhibition “I’m Gonna Get You … Body, Woman, Rupture,” a piece about trauma following domestic violence that features dozens of cloth dolls suspended from the center’s ceiling, conjures images of lynching, according to WUSA9. Garcia received a $50,000 grant from DCCAH to create the work, and said the city asked her to dismantle the piece following the complaint.

The commission declined to make any representatives available on the record for this story.

It’s not clear where the language of the amendment originated, but it bears the signature of DCCAH Interim Executive Director Angie Gates.

One of those such organizations is the DC Arts Center in Adams Morgan, whose executive director, B. Stanley, signed and returned the amendment right away.

“It didn’t strike me as particularly odd, to tell you the truth,” Stanley says. “I see this as a cover-your-ass amendment in the case of something extreme. I imagine of all the different organizations we kind of walk closer to the line of something extreme than any.” He brings up DCAC’s recent play How to Win a Race War, which parodies white supremacist fiction, as an example. 

Stanley says he expected the amendment to be challenged, and even if it hadn’t been, he doubts that it would have been possible for the DCCAH to keep tabs on all the music, theater, visual arts, dance, and music across the city to gauge its art for anything inappropriate.

“I don’t think that someone had thought this through,” he says. “Someone who just didn’t have the right perspective was trying to work this through without interaction with whole community. The commission could have done a town hall meeting, about how do we deal with this stuff … while dealing with the spectre of censorship.”

Gaither says in the days following the email, she had plenty of conversations with fellow artists who were more frustrated, just as she was. “Everyone was just debating … ‘I need the money, but I can’t sign that,'” she says. For her part, she hadn’t signed the letter, and sent an email back to DCCAH asking for more information about the amendment.

Gaither’s DCCAH-funded work last year was a series in collaboration with D.C. Public Library about banned books. “We were dealing with censorship and now it’s right in my face,” she says. She hasn’t fully planned out what she’ll make with the money this year, but says that if he had to refuse the funding over this amendment, “it would have been harder” to do her work.

Both Stanley and Gaither say they found out the amendment had been rescinded when friends shared links to media outlets with the news. The commission sent a letter, signed by Gates, to grant recipients on Thursday, saying the amendment was an “over-correction” to address concerns “raised during a previous grant-funded project.”

“The amended language … in no way was designed to deviate from or alter the current practice, policies, guidelines, and statutory authority of the agency,” the letter, obtained by DCist, reads.

Still, Gaither says she’s dissatisfied with how DCCAH handled this rollout.

“As artists, it’s our job to advocate as we can for ourselves,” Gaither says. “This was definitely a wakeup call.”