GoMA, the Gallery of Modern Art in Royal Exchange Square, Glasgow, is one of the most-visited contemporary art galleries in the UK, outside London. Every other year, GoMA  runs a social justice exhibition from April to October, and this year, the exhibition focusses on art reflecting and discussing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex lives and the human rights of LGBTI people: a gallery of art from around the world and from Scotland, from April to November, and temporary balcony exhibits in collaboration with community groups focussing on particular aspects of LGBTI life.

The first negative media coverage this exhibition received was the decision to include two of Robert Mapplethorpe's black and white photographs. Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)  was an American photographer best known for his explicit portraits of naked men. In 1990 the director of Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center, Dennis Barrie, was arrested and put on trial for running an exhibition with these and other images, but the jury then acquitted him, determining that the photos did have artistic merit. In response to the decision to include the two Mapplethorpe artworks, Glasgow City Council withdrew its original plans to have school parties tour the exhibition, and children under 12 were banned from entering the gallery. Much of the feedback from visitors to the exhibition in the first weeks after it opened was about how surprised they were that it was not an especially controversial exhibition – from the media coverage they had expected more shocking material than they found.

Between April and June, one of two balcony displays was of two lesbian and gay cartoonists, Kate Charlesworth and David Shenton, who are well known in the LGBTI community for their work in the Pink Paper and in other places: Drawn Out and Painted Pink. The other balcony exhibition was work by the LGBT Youth Scotland and Our Story Scotland Community Outreach workshops, Our Vivid Stories. In June the exhibits changed to Rendering Gender, featuring work done by the Scottish Transgender Alliance’s TRANSforming Arts group, and Made In God's Image – a selection of art and artistic concepts by LGBTI people of faith. One conceptual piece of art was proposed by Jane Clarke, a minister of Glasgow MCC: a table, a Bible, a cup of pens, an invitation to LGBTI people to “write themselves back into the Bible” - to allow people who had been excluded by conventional religion to include themselves back in.

Unfortunately, the work was unmonitored, and while some people wrote as the artist had intended, and others wrote more angrily, expressing their hurt, many people made use of the book and the pens simply to write obscenities without artistic merit or religious intent. This was picked up by various tabloid papers, and grew into what was made out to be an international religious scandal – even Pope Benedict weighed in, according to a quote used in several papers from an unnamed senior Vatican priest, claiming the stunt was “disgusting and offensive”.  

Jane Clarke, the MCC minister who proposed this, said, "Writing our names in the margins of a Bible was to show how we have been marginalised by many Christian churches, and also our desire to be included in God’s love. As a young Christian I was encouraged by my church to write my own insights in the margins of the Bible I used for my daily devotions – this was an extension of that idea. I still have that Bible, although it’s rather tatty now. It was never my intention to offend anyone – believers and non-believers alike. I had hoped that people would show respect for the Bible, for Christianity and indeed for the Gallery of Modern Art. I am saddened that some people have chosen to write offensive messages."

GoMA responded: the most offensive messages were removed, the Bible was put behind glass, and visitors were given slips of paper to write messages on rather than the book itself.

Made In God's Image is now closed. The next balcony exhibits were to include work by Dani Marti, but the status of this and other community exhibits is now in doubt. Additional information about the community campaign about this controversy is available via the links above.