A group of artists participating in the Whitney Museum‘s Independent Study Program (ISP) have withdrawn their work from a capstone exhibition at Westbeth Gallery in protest of the institution’s cancellation of a pro-Palestine performance.
The Whitney announced the cancellation of No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, a piece by artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi, on May 12, two days before it was scheduled to take place as part of the programming for the ISP curatorial exhibition “a grammar of attention.” Per its press materials, the exhibition aimed to examine the “tangled” legacies of anti-colonial and anti-racist movements worldwide, and encompassed workshops, installation, and performance.
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The performance, titled after a line in the poem “State of Siege,” by Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish, was described by its performers as an invitation to mourn the Palestinians killed under the Israeli occupation and imagine alternative means of resistance. For an hour or so, the performers were to interpret “scores” written by Natalie Diaz, Christina Sharpe, and Brandon Shimoda through physical and verbal gestures that give form to grief.
According to a statement posted to Instagram from ISP’s Associate Director, Sara Nadal-Melsió, No Aesthetics had been canceled by the Whitney Museum after its leadership viewed a recording of its initial presentation at the Poetry Project, which staged the piece in collaboration with Jewish Currents. Tbakhi opened the performance with the following address to attendees: “You may only remain in this audience if you love Palestinians wholly and completely, you may only remain if you love us while we are alive and when we are dead, when we are fighting for survival, dignity, land, return, real and sustainable life using any and all methods available to us.”
Tbakhi continued that attendees could not remain for the performance if they “believe in Israel in any incarnation.” It’s not clear if anyone left the room during the performance, video documentation of which was reviewed by ARTnews.
In a statement to ARTnews, the Whitney said that its decision to cancel the performance was “clear and necessary,” though not taken lightly.
“At the beginning of the performance, one of the artists called for anyone who believes in Israel or America in any incarnation to leave the audience. Later, the artist valorized specific acts of violence and imagery of violence,” the museum said, adding that there was “no instance when we would find it acceptable to single out members of our community based on their belief system and ask them to leave an exhibition or performance.”
The Whitney also said that there are other works examining the Israeli occupation and the war in Gaza that are still included in the exhibition at the Westbeth Artists Housing building, a short walk south of the museum.
“The Whitney’s decision to cancel the show does not come as a complete surprise, as for almost the past three weeks, our capstone projects, across all ISP cohorts, have undergone an intense level of scrutiny from the senior administration of the museum,” reads a statement from the curators Bea Ortega Botas, Kennedy Hollins Jones, Tamara Khasanova, and Ntshadi Mofokeng. “We, as curators, stand by the works of all the artists in our show, and condemn the museum’s actions.”
Nadal-Melsió added in her statement that the introduction would not have been read at the ISP performance, and that Whitney director Scott Rothkopf, who reportedly delivered the news of its cancellation in a meeting, had not visited the exhibition or responded to her requests to upper management to open a dialogue with the cohort. Nadal-Melsió was hired in February 2024 as the ISP’s first associate director. She concluded her statement by stressing that the focus of the cancellation should not be Tbakhi, but rather that the “independence of the ISP has been seriously compromised.”
Since its founding in 1968 by Ron Clark, the Whitney Independent Study Program has ushered hundreds of artists, curators and critics through its nine-month fellowship. The prestigious program consists of three separate programs: Fifteen applicants are chosen to participate in the Studio Program, four in the Curatorial Program, and six in the Critical Program, for a total of 25 per cohort.
No diplomas are issued at its conclusion, but its alumni roster is a litany of New York creative luminaries, including Naomi Beckwith, Emily Jacir, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, and Jenny Holzer. The ISP occupied various venues across New York City until 2023, when it settled in Roy Lichtenstein’s former Greenwich Village home and studio, which had been gifted to the Whitney. That same year, ISP alum Gregg Bordowitz, an artist, writer, and activist, was named director.
“The museum’s current intrusion into the educational curriculum and administration of the ISP is unprecedented,” Bordowitz said in a statement, as first quoted by Artnet News. “The museum’s interference in the programming of the ISP is weirdly inconsistent, often contradictory and capricious. Most sad and unfair are the ways the museum administrators disregard and disrespect the participants of the ISP who have been wrongly, unfairly, and carelessly placed in the most vulnerable positions.
“I support the ISP participants,” Bordowitz said. “They met the aggressive challenges of the museum with thoughtfulness and grace.”
The Whitney is no stranger to political activism within or outside its walls. In 2017, the museum staged a show drawn from its permanent collection titled “An Incomplete History of Protest.” The show contextualized art-making as an expression of political dissidence within the United States, with a focus on how museums became a stage for artist-led activism in response to, among more, America’s military operations in Vietnam, and the Civil Rights movement. Its also among the many New York museums that have been protested since October 7, 2023, with artists and activists urging board members and senior leadership to sever cultural and financial ties to Israel, and to publicly label the conflict in Gaza a genocide. (No museum in New York has done so, as of May 2025.) In November 2023, the main entrance of the Whitney was splashed with fake blood in a protest against Ken Griffin, a former Whitney board member and Citadel CEO who called for repercussions for pro-Palestine student groups and demonstrators. That demonstration coincided with a march for Gaza in which demonstrators attempted to travel to the Whitney via the High Line, the suspended public park that passes by the museum, before being blocked by the police.
Pro-Palestine arts and culture workers made it inside the Whitney in May 2024 during its “Free Friday Night” event. Inside the museum lobby, the autonomous group distributed custom-printed brochure in the museum’s stylized branding that detailed the links between its funders and sponsors to “genocide and dispossession,” including Israel’s ground and air assault on Gaza. Protestors also overlaid works in the then-on view Whitney Biennial with footage of families in Gaza prior to the Hamas attack on Israel and during the subsequent Israeli response, which has lasted nearly 600 days.
In March 2025, the number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip because of Israel’s actions surpassed 50,000, according to health authorities in Gaza. This month, the UN’s child rights agency (UNICEF) warned that more than 9,000 thousand children have been admitted for care for acute malnutrition since the start of the war, and that thousands more face imminent starvation due to the blockade of humanitarian aid to the coastal enclave.
Speaking to ARTnews on the condition of anonymity, a member of the ISP studio cohort involved with the performance said that they think whether museums embrace “militancy depends on what the militant looks like, and what’s their cause.”
Of the Whitney and ISP, they added that “only Palestine matters. If the cancellation drives people’s energy towards that cause, then it’ll have been worth it.”
