[citation needed] In 1961, the U.S. Customs at the Idlewild Airport in Queens, New York seized the book she was traveling with, The Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, which was banned at the time.
[2] Iannone sued the U.S. Customs with assistance from the New York Civil Liberties Union which caused her book to be returned and the ban on Miller to be lifted.
[2] Her explicit renderings of the human body draw heavily from the artist's travels and from Japanese woodcuts, Greek vases, and visual motifs from Eastern religions, including Tibetan Buddhism, Indian Tantrism, and Christian ecstatic traditions like those of the seventeenth-century Baroque.
"[2] In 1969, the Kunsthalle Bern tried to censor Iannone's work in the group exhibition Ausstellung der Freunde by requesting that she cover up the genitals of her figures.
[7] In protest, Dieter Roth dropped out of the exhibition, and the curator of the Kunsthalle Bern, Harald Szeeman, resigned.
For instance, I Am Whoever You Want Me To Be (1970) and I Begin To Feel Free (1970) reference both Antony and Cleopatra as well as brightly colored African tribal imagery.