Independent Study Program: Open Letter & Solidarity Statement

Image: "Forbidden Colors" (1988) by ISP alum Felix Gonzalez Torres. Installed in Felix Gonzalez-Torres: This Place. Metropolitan Arts Centre, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. 30 Oct. 2015 – 24 Jan. 2016. Cur. Eoin Dara. Image courtesy of Metropolitan Arts Centre. © Estate of Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after the war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie's prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors--red, black, green and white--placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in Soho, will not precipitate a similar reaction.

From the first moment of encounter, the four color canvases in this room will "speak" to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. A few experts will interpret them as yet another minimalist ecstasy. Now that you've read this text, I hope for a different message.

For all the PWAs.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres
New York City 1988

[source: The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation]

To the Whitney Museum of American Art:

As Alumni, Faculty, and Friends of the Whitney Independent Study Program, we unequivocally support the 2024–25 ISP cohort who were censored when presenting work in solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian freedom. We uplift their efforts to create and debate art while reckoning with political violence and institutional coercion, and affirm our shared solidarity against the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

On May 12, the Whitney Museum unilaterally canceled the performance “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance.” The 2024-25 cohort of participants has publicly and collectively outlined their opposition to this act of censorship, including the financial and sociopolitical entanglements the board of the Whitney Museum holds in relation to this genocide. We support and reiterate their statements found here:

The artist list for a grammar of attention, the 2025 Whitney Independent Study Program Curatorial Exhibition, is no longer accurate. When this show was announced publicly on the Whitney Museum's website on May 2nd and at the time of the show's opening on May 9th, artists Fad I Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi were scheduled to perform on Wednesday, May 14th. On May 12th, the curators of this exhibition were told that the Whitney Museum had decided to cancel their performance.

In light of the artists' removal from the show, we, the curators and artists involved in the performance, encourage you to take, read, and share the scores of the performance that the artists were to interpret. This event was to be grounded in the struggle for Palestinian freedom, while making space to mourn those who have been martyred in that struggle. We carry forward that ethos even in the absence of the performance.

"Take these scores with you back into the world, to interpret in your own community, in your house, or your church, or your organizing meetings, or your protests. Their purpose is to create a space to feel, grieve, rage, scream, cry, so that we can carry on fighting each day for the survival of those the world is killing.

Share these scores. Photocopy them. Write your own.

They don't belong to anyone. They are for the dead."

[From the score of No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance]

Note from the curators:

"We are incensed by the Whitney Museum's cancellation of the performance No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance by artists Fad I Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi. We echo and support the artists' wishes in this moment and encourage everyone to treat this as "a moment to redirect attention and material support to Palestinians on the ground living and surviving under a campaign of genocide and extermination.”

As the curators of a grammar of attention, we have gathered artistic practices that bear and build witness to that which is fraught, incomplete, unsettled, yet tethered to our present. We invited the artists part of No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance to present a second iteration of this work, which explores, through performance, the limitations and capacities to build a space to mourn and resist in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

The Whitney's decision to cancel the show does not come as a 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.

We, as curators, stand by the works of all the artists in our show, and condemn the museum's actions.”

-Bea Ortega Botas, Kennedy Hollins Jones, Tamara Khasanova, Ntshadi Mofokeng

[see original statement on instagram]

Statement on the Cancellation of the ISP Critical Studies Symposium:

We, the ISP Symposium Participants, have decided to cancel the event set to be held on May 18, 2025 at the Whitney Museum.

The texts that we planned to share at this event are the product of deep, collective study. In them, we ask incisive questions about institutions, art/works, labor, bodies and flesh, race, political struggles, colonial power, violence, death, and the very nature of writing and making now. It has become impossible to share these texts inside the Whitney Museum with dignity.

The Whitney Museum has surveilled and scrutinized our work, intervened upon our practices, and degraded the independent criticality that has long been associated with the ISP. This has occurred across all three cohorts. Such surveillance is unprecedented. It escalated to the Whitney Museum's unilateral cancellation of the performance No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance on May 12. This effectively forbade the collective and public mourning of Palestinian lives.

With these actions, the senior leadership at the Whitney Museum has abandoned its self-declared "Mission & Values," including "that we must be as experimental, responsive, and risk-taking as the artists with whom we collaborate," and "that we must lead with expertise, debate, self-reflection, and integrity."

Under these conditions, sharing our work at the Whitney Museum has become untenable. We refuse to uphold the illusion of the Whitney Museum as a liberal-progressive institution. Our work at the ISP is made in spite of and in opposition to the financial and socio-political investments of the Whitney Museum.

The Independent Study Program must find an independent way forward. Rigorous criticality and study are urgently needed. We are committed to collective liberation and insurgent praxis. We stand in solidarity with our fellow participants and are proud of the work we've made together.
[see original statement on instagram]

On Withdrawal from the Whitney ISP Capstone Exhibition, Prototype, at Westbeth Gallery:

We, the majority of participants in the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) studio cohort, have decided to withdraw our work from the Prototype capstone exhibition at Westbeth Gallery.

This decision arises from the fundamental contradictions of free artistic expression within institutions deeply embedded instructural violence and shaped by the financial interests of their board members. These interests ultimately limit the scope of critical and transformative possibilities by influencing what can be seen, said, and staged within these spaces.

On May 12th, 2025, just two days before it was scheduled, the Whitney Museum of American Art canceled No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, a work that offered space to honor and mourn Palestinian lives lost in the ongoing assault on Gaza. This act echoed a broader regime of repression targeting pro-Palestinian speech and it exposed the limits of critique inside institutions.

The ISP presents itself as an independent space-but that independence is a myth. The Whitney Museum actively undermines ISP principles of critical inquiry, artistic autonomy, innovation, experimentation, and activist practices through scrutiny, surveillance, and censorship. As artists, we have a responsibility to transform theory into practice. Our collective refusal to participate in the capstone exhibition is not just symbolic; it is a direct challenge to the institution's legitimacy, especially as the Whitney censors Palestinian artists and profits from exploitation and oppression.

We are not just withdrawing, we are demanding. We demand the Whitney Museum to face its complicity in genocide and confront the deeper entanglement with its board members. We call on artists and cultural workers to direct solidarity and material resources toward Palestinian liberation, now in the 77th year of the ongoing Nakba.

We stand in unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom and dignity.

Free Palestine

[see original statement on instagram]

Statement by ISP Associate Director Regarding the Whitney's Cancellation of No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance and the ISP cohort's response:

The Whitney Independent Study Program has been a space promoting the work of the arts for more than half a century. It stands by the rights of artists to express themselves and embodies the duties of artists to think and discuss freely. Its foundational premises are that it is independent—free from outside influences that would dictate what to think or discuss-and a place for study—to learn with and from others.

This work has always been unapologetically engaged with the politics of its times. The ISP began amid the revolutionary energies of May 68, the movement against the Vietnam War, the state violence of the Kent State massacre and fully coalesced around AIDS activism two decades later. Today, this means participants in the Program continue to think for themselves and provoke thought in others about contexts including but not limited to fascism at home and the relentless genocide being carried out in Gaza. And sadly today, this means that we also face unprecedented censorship and a threat to our foundational independence because of our pursuit of the very dialogue that make the ISP what it is.

Since joining the ISP, my highest priority has been to sustain and nurture a collective and independent study community of artists, curators, and writers based on care, trust, and a political commitment to the experimentalism of artmaking, thinking, and writing. Our shared medium is conversation, one that is thoughtful, open, caring, and courageous.

The members of the ISP remain committed to the collective practice of artworkers, many of whom belong to demographics that are more vulnerable than ever-among them, gender dissidents, political refugees, visa holders, and survivors of armed conflict, racism, and assault. It takes a lot of work and care to build a community, but only a moment of thoughtless violence to destroy, compromise, or instrumentalize it. The Whitney Museum, which for more than half a century supported this work, has disappointed us in the past weeks. This was particularly painful for our community when, on Wednesday May 7, one of the cohort's artists, Ash Moniz, was assaulted on the NYC subway for being a trans woman wearing a Palestinian scarf. Rather than put out a statement in her support or reaching out expressing solidarity and concern to Ash, the museum chose to ignore the issue and instead continue to put the ISP under scrutiny. This scrutiny was carried out under the pretense of "security" for Whitney Museum audiences and the need to screen for "offensive" content. We needed protection, instead we got surveillance.

For the past three weeks, all ISP capstone projects--traditionally culminating in two exhibitions and a critical studies Symposium--have been subjected to an unprecedented level of scrutiny from the senior administration at the Whitney Museum. The announcement of the ISP capstone events on e-flux was cancelled, and the museum delayed the release of online content as long as possible to deny the shows normal visibility. Additionally, the admissions process for next year's ISP cohort has also been halted by the museum administration until further notice.

On Wednesday May 12, the director of the Whitney Museum, Scott Rothkopf, decided to cancel a performance by artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi interpreting a score of texts by Brandon Shimada, Christina Sharpe, and Natalie Diaz. The performance was called No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance. The title is borrowed from a line in Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish's poem "State of Siege," and the piece was originally commissioned by Jewish Currents. The performance was integrated in a nuanced and poetic statement of transnational political solidarity and an examination of entangled colonial, capitalist and anti-Black violence that, as the curators write in their ISP exhibition text "unfolds as a resonant chamber through a program of performances, installations, and workshops." The exhibition, titled “a grammar of attention" is, they continue, "both an invitation and an offering: to bear and build witness to that which is fraught, incomplete, unauthorized, unsettled yet tethered to our present.” Rothkopf did not visit the exhibition and every single of my requests to upper management to engage the curatorial cohort in conversation was rejected.

The ostensible reason given by the Whitney for the cancellation was something unrelated to the show itself. One of the artists, Fargo Tbakhi, had introduced a first iteration of this piece at The Poetry Project in admittedly provocative language. But the point of artistic freedom has never been that it shies away from controversy or anger. And the point of defending it has never been that we agree with everything an individual says. The point is that we must refuse the right-wing extremism that seek to dictate what everyone is allowed to believe and express. The point is to insist on a free society and to stand in solidarity with other individuals and educational institutions under attack by this newly amplified right-wing extremism.

And furthermore, the logic of banning the performance based on what one person said is flawed, because the choral clamor that constitutes the "No Aesthetics" performance is bigger than any individual. Fargo had every right to his political rage, but this was not about him alone. It was about the collective voices gathered in "a grammar of attention." I disagree with and regret the museum's cancellation of this performance and stand with all the artists in the exhibition and with the Palestinian people. I remain proud and fully supportive of "a grammar of attention"—a show that, sadly, may no longer be possible in the US's current context of policing, suppression, deliberate ignorance, and fear.

I stand wholeheartedly in solidarity with all the ISP participants and the study community we have become, even in the most challenging political climate. I am honored to be part of this community, and our work together continues to give me hope, even now. I believe this year's capstone events represents the best the ISP has to offer. The independence of the ISP has been seriously compromised. I call on everyone who believes that art has a place in the struggle for free speech to support the survival of this extraordinary and urgently necessary experimental study community, and not only this one.

Sara Nadal-Melsió, Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program

[see original statement on Cabinet Magazine]

The canceled performance, scrutinized artwork and scholarship, and atmosphere of censorship have their roots in a broader political climate of fear and intimidation in the United States, and follow other recent crackdowns on free expression, protest, and speech by artists and scholars supporting Palestine. The undersigned reaffirm our commitment to practices of integrity, risk, and autonomy, particularly under regimes of oppression and suppression.

The Whitney Museum's stated mission and core values are grounded precisely in its acceptance of dissent, reinvention, and activism. If the Whitney Museum denies the ISP the ability to independently persist as a site of critique over an ongoing genocide, then the Whitney Museum loses all claim to uphold the very values it cites as its guiding principles.

Signed,
[alumni & faculty]

Signed,
[friends & allies]

Press

“Whitney Museum Suspends Independent Study Program,” Rhea Nayyar, Hyperallergic, June 2, 2025. [PDF]

“Whitney Museum Suspends Program After Dispute Over Gaza Event,” Zachary Small, The New York Times, June 2, 2025, sec. Arts. [PDF]

“Amid Censorship Outrcry, Whitney Museum ‘Pauses’ Its Storied Independent Study Program,” Artnet News, June 2, 2025. [PDF]

“Whitney Museum suspends Independent Study Program,” ArtReview, June 3, 2025. [PDF]

“Whitney Museum Suspends Independent Study Program After Cancelling Pro-Palestinian Performance,“ Elaine YJ Zheng, Ocula, June 3, 2025. [PDF]

“To the Whitney Museum of American Art - Notes,” e-flux, June 4, 2025. [PDF]

“Whitney Museum Pauses Independent Study Program amid Accusations of Censorship,” Benjamin Sutton, The Art Newspaper, June 4, 2025. [PDF]

Independent Study Program: Open Letter & Solidarity Statement

To the Whitney Museum of American Art:

Signed, [alumni & faculty]

Signed, [friends & allies]

Press

Signed,
[alumni & faculty]

Signed,
[friends & allies]