On June 2, Whitney Museum Director Scott Rothkopf sent an email to select alumni announcing the suspension of the 50-year-old Independent Study Program (ISP). Citing a leadership gap, he officially canceled admissions for the 2025-26 cohort, which had already been mysteriously halted for two months even after final interviews were completed. During that same hour, the Associate Director of the Whitney ISP was informed that their position had been terminated.
This dismissal came just two weeks after the employee released a public statement protesting the Whitney's cancellation of the performance "No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance." The performance was an expression of transnational solidarity with the Palestinian people and was part of the ISP curatorial show "a grammar of attention."
Both the dismissal and the ISP suspension were the result of months of the museum's combined disregard and scrutiny of the program. These actions represented another blunt refusal to engage in dialogue and further evidence of consistent lack of clarity, bordering on deliberate obfuscation, regarding the ISP's future. This included the circumstances surrounding former ISP Director Gregg Bordowitz's demotion on February 2.
The terminated employee acknowledged that discussing this story is painful in both personal and impersonal ways, recognizing it follows a well-worn institutional playbook. As scholar Sarah Ahmed writes in her 2021 book "Complaint!": "To complain about abuse of power is to learn about power."
Being witness to and victim of the Whitney's actions provided new insights into decimated workers' rights and increased precarity. It revealed a pervasive corporate culture of Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) that keep most people in the dark about how often power protects itself through concealment. The experience exposed recalcitrant misogyny and scapegoating, systemic racisms that continue to find cover in tokenism, and the ever-widening gap between overtaxed museum workers and upper management.
It also highlighted the conservatism of museums and their boards, and institutions' utter disregard for actual learning, actual community, and even the actual value of art in the world. While experiencing layered hurts and disappointment, those invested in protecting artists and artmaking should not lose sight of the bigger picture.
These acts of administrative violence are increasingly common and can be best understood in their entanglement and continuity with one another. The details of the ISP case carry damaging consequences for experimental learning spaces in museums, especially one that has not upheld its mission statement to be experimental, responsive, and risk-taking.
Since joining the ISP in February 2024, the terminated employee's priority had been introducing new programming to sustain and nurture a community of artists, curators, and writers based on care, trust, and political commitment to the inventiveness of artmaking, thinking, and writing. Their shared medium was thoughtful, open, caring, and courageous conversation.
The ISP had an extraordinary year. Participants were writing zines together, collaborating, and thriving as a collective. An expanded range of 50 artists, philosophers, musicians, poets, and art historians visited the program in various capacities. In addition to traditional seminars, they held workshops and communal meals, gathered in assemblies, and organized site visits to alternative art spaces engaged in sustainable practices.
The two final shows and Critical Symposium papers provided ample proof of the participants' work quality. Yet the beauty and promise of this artistic community have been buried by the Whitney's leadership, with its starkly disproportionate recourse to retaliatory institutional violence.
Despite this, the former employee firmly believes that when taking the fullest responsibility possible, words and actions matter now more than ever. As democratic values in the United States erode at an accelerated pace, acts of silencing and erasure at artistic and academic institutions will continue to occur, but they cannot go unchallenged.
Examples include Columbia University, the Noguchi Museum, and Paramount. To challenge these effectively, people must cease treating any of these incidents as isolated or exceptional.
A case in point is the Whitney Museum itself, which likely supported Amy Sherald's decision to cancel her show at the Smithsonian, and rightly so, while simultaneously censoring and even quashing the ISP for its pro-Palestinian content. The violence with which the museum counters acts of protest and demands for equality gives the measure of the threat they pose.
As Laura Raicovich recently wrote in an opinion piece for Hyperallergic, "Silence is complicity, and pre-compliance is not an option." There's an urgent need to build on practices of solidarity that can interrupt isolationism, fear, and the retrenchment of individualism. There is strength in numbers.
This is especially true regarding global outrage at the Palestinian genocide, confirmed by the swiftness with which pro-Palestinian speech continues to be repressed. It will surprise no one that the canceled performance of Palestinian mourning was also a call to pay attention to the entangled violences of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide.
The title was borrowed from a line in late Palestinian writer Mahmoud Darwish's 2002 poem "State of Siege," and the piece was originally commissioned by Jewish Currents. Palestinian-American artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi planned to interpret a score through gestures to create a global space to mourn and resist the Palestinian genocide by connecting it, across time and space, to other colonial genocides.
This bears repeating because it is truly extraordinary: The Whitney Museum of American Art censored a performance score with texts by Natalie Diaz, Christina Sharpe, and Brandon Shimoda.
Being part of something larger than each individual reminds people not only that they cannot go at it alone but that, in fact, they are not alone. This collective force cannot be underestimated. The ISP itself is an example of this - not only in how they grew as a community through the year, but just as importantly, how they stood arm-in-arm and pushed back collectively on the museum's censorship.
This solidarity and the inverse of its very real power is legible in the museum's response. The moving accumulation of several statements of dissent in solidarity, written in quick succession and amplifying one another with the force of a shared commitment, remains as a testament to this labor of community.
The 2024-25 cohort is a model of what the ISP can and could be, if it abides by its critical commitments. In the aftermath of its censorship and dissolution of the next cohort and the job termination, the Whitney has now set up a working group to discuss the program's future.
The irony, of course, is that the future of the ISP, and even its legacy, is precisely what the museum has so thoroughly compromised. Make no mistake - the Whitney Museum has suspended a space of collective thought and conviviality when it is most needed. Not because it was in crisis or not working, but because it was rich with critical and creative collective possibilities.
Critical thought and artistic freedom, together with experimentalism and the risk-taking they require in uncertain times, are the first things to be shuttered, and even ridiculed, in this climate of subservience to the Trump administration and its many acts of overlapping suppression.
Writers, thinkers, and artmakers working in any medium possess the means to remind everyone that things can and must be different. The labor of the imagination is, in the worst of times, essential for collective political action.
Today, there is no doubt that opposing the total violence of the Palestinian genocide is front and center of any criticality worth its name. This is a rare moment of clarity. The genocide in Gaza is an intensification and a nexus of entwined violences in a landscape of enforced complicity.
Beneath its brutality lie all the trademarks of the world we live in, among them: occupation, expropriation, and extraction; racial capitalism and apartheid; coloniality and ecocide. This is not to instrumentalize the suffering of Gaza, but to give a value of a different order to lives lost and livelihoods shattered.
It is to refuse to enter the calculations of a for-profit killing machine and, instead, to find strength and resolve in communal grief. It is to understand that mourning can become a beginning and not just an end. In fact, public mourning in the context of collective art making and earnest, impassioned study is exactly what the cancellation of "No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom" preempted.
Even after experiencing how far the Whitney was willing to go, the terminated employee would and continues to do the same: offer full and unwavering support to the censored Palestinian artists and the ISP cohort. Only by expressing dissent when it matters, by embracing the risk and uncertainty of any political action, do people become a critical mass.
This choice exists every time someone speaks up, thinks critically, or makes art as practices of freedom and instruments of change and political solidarity. Only in this way will people be able to support one another while continuing to dissent and resist. Because dissent and resist they must. Together.
