On Monday, Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf despatched the museum’s Independent Study Program an e-mail during which he stated he would “pause” this system’s 2025–26 educational 12 months.
“In the present day, this system is and not using a Director,” Rothkopf wrote in that e-mail, which was obtained by ARTnews. “This management hole has strained each the strategic imaginative and prescient and the day-to-day operations of this system. We respect the large dedication members make when becoming a member of the ISP.”
Rothkopf additional wrote that “this era of institutional reflection is in line with the spirit and values of studying, inquiry, and demanding apply which can be foundational to the ISP and the Whitney as a complete.”
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The e-mail got here on the identical day {that a} vary of high-profile artists and writers related to the ISP issued an open letter during which they denounced the establishment’s determination to cancel a pro-Palestine efficiency in Might.
“The Whitney Museum’s said mission and core values are grounded exactly in its acceptance of dissent, reinvention, and activism,” the open letter stated. “If the Whitney Museum denies the ISP the power to independently persist as a website of critique over an ongoing genocide, then the Whitney Museum loses all declare to uphold the very values it cites as its guiding rules.”
Its signatories had been primarily ISP alumni, and included artists as Emily Jacir, Andrea Fraser, Mark Dion, Carlos Motta, Candice Breitz, Omar Mismar, Deborah Kass, and Hannah Black. Additionally among the many signatories had been former college members, together with the artwork historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, in addition to former seminar leaders akin to artists Walid Raad and Louise Lawler.
The letter addressed the cancellation of the performance No Aesthetics Exterior My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Efficiency, by the artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakhi. It was canceled two days earlier than it was to be a part of a curatorial exhibition by the ISP program, which has cultivated a number of generations of artists, curators, and critics.
In a earlier iteration of the work, staged by the Poetry Undertaking in collaboration with Jewish Currents, Tbakhi invited attendees to go away the efficiency in the event that they “imagine in Israel in any incarnation.” After that introduction, performers then interpreted scores by Natalie Diaz, Christina Sharpe, and Brandon Shimoda that referred to grief.
The Whitney’s prior assertion talked about the introduction and accused the artists of getting “valorized particular acts of violence and imagery of violence.” Furthermore, the museum stated that there was “no occasion once we would discover it acceptable to single out members of our group based mostly on their perception system and ask them to go away an exhibition or efficiency.”
Information of the efficiency’s cancellation broke in mid-Might and coincided with studies that artist Gregg Bordowitz had been demoted from his submit as director of the ISP. Based on Artnet Information, Bordowitz was demoted in February. “The museum’s present intrusion into the tutorial curriculum and administration of the ISP is unprecedented,” Bordowitz stated on the time.
The studies of the efficiency’s cancellation had been adopted by a protest held at the museum final month.
In Monday’s open letter, the ISP alumni wrote that “the canceled efficiency, scrutinized paintings and scholarship, and ambiance of censorship have their roots in a broader political local weather of worry and intimidation in america, and comply with different current crackdowns on free expression, protest, and speech by artists and students supporting Palestine.”
