The panel which selected Evers consisted ofJames B. Cuno, director of the Harvard UniversityArt Museums; Doris Chu, president of the ChineseCultural Institute in Boston, and Barbara Krakow,owner of the Krakow Gallery in Boston.

In November, however, Chu told reporters thatshe had not seen sexually explicit works and wouldnot have approved the exhibit had she known of itsgraphic content.

Evers, who was born in Curacao and now lives inCambridge, defended his work in an interviewyesterday.

"The exhibit, as I pointed out in the past,deals with issues of gender [and] sexual identityand incorporates elements that are anatomicallyexplicit, but there's nothing lewd about them," hesaid.

The Gallery 57 show was Evers' first inCambridge.

Walsh "has caused a lot of problems," Everssaid. Following the show, Evers had been "worryingabout the show not going up initially, worryingabout the safety of my work, being upset about mywork being destroyed" before the show opened.

"It was an attempt at an act of censorship,"Evers said.

Evers said the damage was substantially morethan the cost of the removed dildos. "The damagewasn't only done to the dildos, but to the systemthat was placed in the box and the labor it tookto replace them," he said.

In addition, Walsh threatened to counter-sue,charging Evers with public dissemination ofobscene material. A clerk magistrate in thedistrict court found that charge groundless, butgranted Evers' civilian complaint, beginning theprocess leading to today's trial