Cut and paste fig leaves over objectionable areas of art, especially genital area. This is only partial censorship and will endear one with future generations of artists and scholars.

That's a barbed message from artist Jack Heard to Grants Pass Mayor Gordon Anderson. Museum director Don Brown, artist Medora Nankervis and others associated with the museum say that without Anderson, with whom museum members had a much-publicized fight over censorship last fall, the museum wouldn't be in its new digs.

The mayor was out of town Friday to attend a meeting and couldn't be reached for this story.

The recently opened space at 229 S.W. G St., Grants Pass, boasts two large exhibit rooms, offices, storage rooms and lots of space. The building even came with a rent-paying tenant, a business downstairs.

The museum bought the 8,000-square-foot building last fall for $295,000 after parting company with the city in a fight that started when Anderson demanded the right to censor the museum's art exhibits.

The city and the museum had planned a new museum and community center in the city's Riverside Park, where the old museum had stood for many years. Ground was to have been broken last fall. The museum was going to put up $325,000 and build the structure. The city was to have chipped in $223,000. The museum would have paid $1 a year in rent on the land.

Then Anderson touched off a firestorm when he said he wanted city officials to have the power to censor. Anderson said he didn't want to see a crucifix in a glass of urine -- an apparent reference to a controversial art exhibit in Ohio some years ago. Anderson said in a meeting that residents "need some censorship."

The Grants Pass City Council unanimously sided with the museum, authorizing a deal giving the museum control over its exhibits. But Anderson had an agreement written that gave city officials the right to kick the museum out of its building for any reason, including complaints generated by an exhibit.

The flap sparked discussions of censorship on Jefferson Public Radio and at Rogue Community College (in a forum organized by Nankervis) and drew widespread attention from arts advocates and civil libertarians. The American Civil Liberties Union even presented Nankervis with an award for what it called her fight for freedom of expression.

Nankervis, 73, of Rogue River, says she was surprised by all the fuss. An artist and an advocate of arts training for children, she founded an art association and gallery in the city of Rogue River years ago and was on the original Grants Pass Museum's board of directors when it was founded in the 1970s.

She says that many years ago in Rogue River, a minister's wife who was giving a speech removed some paintings of acrobats in leotards from the walls in an art exhibit space that doubled as a meeting site.

"She forgot to put them back up, and I found them back in a corner," Nankervis says. "I was so mad. That was the start of my fight for freedom of expression."

The new museum is a stolid, high-ceilinged, nearly 100-year-old building that spent most of its life as a feed store, most recently called Chet's. It's close to Rogue Community College's Firehouse Gallery and other participants in the town's First Friday art event held the first Friday of each month. Its taxes are frozen at about $1,700 because it's a historic building.

"It was perfect," Brown says.

"Like it was meant to be," Nankervis says.

Now showing in the main gallery, a 56-foot long room, are paintings in a Women's History Month show, the main exhibit for March. In an adjacent 38-foot gallery are paintings by the Ashland artist Ezshwan.

Brown says the building needed surprisingly little work. The museum installed track lights. Bathrooms are being redone. Old skylights are covered but could someday be restored.

A back room that will become a classroom is stuffed with a jumble of paintings -- including a portrait of museum founder Charles Hill and a series of paintings by Nankervis.

A 1928 Georgia O'Keeffe print, "Red Poppy No. VI," hangs above a kitchen area and serving bar, the prize in a drawing to be held in May as part of the Grants Pass Chamber of Commerce's "Amazing May" promotion.

Plans call for a gift shop, an artists' lending library and complete handicapped accessibility. The last item carries a price tag of about $118,000.

"Much of that will be donations in kind," Brown says.

"There's a big wish list," he adds.

The museum's sudden growth should help. Brown says the museum has gained about 100 members this winter, increasing its membership from abound 200 families to about 300.

Why the sudden spurt?

"I think it was the exposure the mayor gave us and the newspaper stories about the censorship issue," Brown says.

"It led to a sense of unity among artists," Nankervis says.