The global effort of the ruling elites and their governments and leading institutions to suppress opposition to the Israeli genocide in Gaza, a world-historical crime, continues.

We post below an interview with Sara Nadal-Melsió, formerly the associate director of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s storied Independent Study Program (ISP). Nadal-Melsió was fired in early June and the entire ISP program for 2025-2026 suspended. These actions followed protests by artists and others, including Nadal-Melsió, over the Whitney’s cancellation of an ISP performance event scheduled for May 14 treating Palestinian mourning and resistance, No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance.

Artists at Risk Connection (ARC), in a June 13 press release, sharply condemned the “seemingly unjustified firing,” adding that 

Firsthand accounts and other records provided to ARC strongly suggest that the firing of Nadal-Melsió and the suspension of the wider program are likely retaliatory acts by the Whitney Museum.

ARC continued:

We call on the museum to immediately reinstate the ISP and commission an independent investigation into the termination of its associate director, examining as well its broader implications for the museum’s stated commitment to artistic freedom.

The ARC statement further noted that Nadal-Melsió had received an immediate termination notice from the Whitney June 2 after a statement she issued regarding the cancellation of the Palestinian event.

In that comment, Nadal-Melsió was quite forthright:

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. …

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 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.

We recently spoke to Nadal-Melsió on a video call.

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David Walsh: Could you discuss a little bit about your own background and how you arrived at the position at the Independent Study Program [ISP] at the Whitney Museum? 

Sara Nadal-Melsió: I am a Catalan writer, scholar, curator. I was in academia for a while. I increasingly lost any belief in academia as a viable medium for critical intellectual inquiry. It has become a full-fledged service economy.

I have taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University and New York University. However, I felt deeply that American academia, which had trained me very well in certain ways, was closing off and narrowing down. I started working with artists, and process-based collaborative practices. I became interested in alternative pedagogies and artist communities as ways to create the infrastructure of support that allows the development of a certain kind of imaginative, open conversation about very difficult issues.

It was a very deliberate choice to “go small” and to the level of a study community. My experience over three years at SOMA summer in Mexico City, a more experimental offshoot of the ISP founded by the artist Carla Herrera-Prats, was truly transformative. It gave me a sense of what a study community might feel like in a fraught political context. I am now teaching at the 2025 London Critical Theory Summer School at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, and I am seeing the same collective hunger to think and learn with others.

When the job at the Whitney Museum opened in the summer of 2023, I had been writing nonstop for more than five years, and I knew this was exactly what I wanted to do next.  It is painful to say but the ISP was my dream job. By then, I had finished two books, one concerned with the practice of activist reading, racial violence and the cumulative logic of a red commonwealth, Politically Red (MIT, 2023) written with Eduardo Cadava. The other was Europe and the Wolf: Political Variations on a Musical Concept (Zone Books, 2025), on the complicity of culture and violence.

More generally, the question for me is: what does it mean to understand that both Marxism and artmaking are ways to work with the infrastructure of the mind, and attempt to understand the objective conditions on the ground and intervene in them? To me, these are not separate—understanding and intervening. The desire to work with artists communities was very much part of this because I firmly believe that without the labor of the imagination no politics is possible.

When I started working with the Independent Study Program at the Whitney, there was a different vision in place for the new location at the Roy Lichtenstein House and Studio, aimed at bringing the program closer to the museum and making it a part of the museum. I thought then and I still think now that was a mistake that compromised the independence of the ISP in more ways than one.

It was also notoriously difficult to get admitted into the ISP—you had to have a direct connection to an alum. The new admission committees included non-alums, people who might not have been invited before, even though their work was a perfect fit in terms of its conceptualism, theoretical import or politics. Because of this, our applications for 2025-2026 grew in number and became even more international. This past year, we spoke eight languages.

The composition of the extraordinary cohort of ‘24-‘25 is a direct result of those changes. I programmed the entire year with them in mind, so that the seminars, lectures, workshops, writing groups and offsite visits to alternative art spaces would create the conditions for a collective conversation.

I conceived the ISP as a collective—we cooked, shared meals, held assemblies, made music, read and wrote together.

This is the letter I wrote to participants. It is no longer on the ISP website:

What does to read, write, curate, and produce art together in one place for nine months entail? How does the sociality of a sustained conversation, embedded in the ISP’s fifty-year living legacy of alternative pedagogies, part of a memory transmitted intergenerationally, and housed in an artist’s studio and home, intensify a collective experience of making and of study? How does the material anchor of a shared space provide the pause and the shelter that will allow ideas the time to transform, grow, accumulate, circulate, and expand amid the social, political, and environmental calamities of our time? How to stay with the trouble but also insist on giving one another the time that will allow our collective imagination, the sturdiest infrastructure of bodies and minds, to become a practice of freedom that finds strength in our capacity to relate to one another as we continue to imagine different beginnings and different ends? Engaging with these questions demands a creative labor of a different order, one that is contiguous with the wonder, surprise, friction, and pleasure of a collaboration that exceeds individual identities to maximize, experiment, materialize, and aggregate into a resource that can be shared.

The final list of ISP seminar and workshop leaders and studio visitors for 2024-25 includes 50 people. Dave McKenzie, Shadi Harouni, Itziar Barrio, Jason Moran, Tania El Khoury, Michael Rakowitz, Cecilia Vicuña, Jonathan Gonzalez, JJJJJerome Ellis, Catherine Malabou and Denise Ferreira da Silva are a just few of the artists and thinkers that were new to the ISP.

In terms of participants, we had a large representation from the Levant region, that means Iran, Lebanon and Egypt, also South Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Ukraine. People came from conflict areas. War was not theoretical. We are thinking and living through the violence of our times, people have friends in prison, friends who are being bombed.

The first person I invited for 2024-25  was [Italian radical academic] Silvia Federici, and she said to me, you probably don’t want me to talk about Gaza, and I said, I'm inviting you because I know you will. She came back for a communal dinner at the ISP with her partner, philosopher and poet George Caffentzis. Iranian participants delivered a moving reading of the preface to Silvia’s Revolution Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle in Farsi translated by Nazanin Keynejad, still in prison, highlighting the struggles of global feminism. It was a beautiful and necessary celebration of community and shared purpose.

I also gave a series of seminars titled, “On Violence: Deposition Abolition, Strike.” It addressed the polysemy of “violence” and its consequences. Violence means many different things and, unless we begin to distinguish between those difference violences, we will remain at the mercy of the worst kind. So, for instance, there’s institutional and police-state violence, but there’s also the very necessary violence of protest language. There’s the violence of art. There is even the violence of poetry. A kind of poetic violence that needs to be embraced because it functions as a counter-violence.

DW: Concretely, how many people were involved, what ages were they, and so forth?

SN-M: At the ISP, we accept a total of 25 participants, 15 artists, six writers and four curators. Everybody in the program used to be around graduate school age. This year we went from 22 years old to 42. The more variety in terms of age, the better the community; the more languages, the better; the more different backgrounds, the better; because it is about building a common language that we would forge through collective practice.

DW: Why did you write your May 19 statement?

SN-M: I wrote my statement after the performance cancellation because I knew, as somebody who is also a scholar and researcher of social movements, that archives get buried fast, but they don't always get destroyed. A line had been crossed and that had to be recorded. Somebody will come along one day and they will find a trace, they will know what happened at the Whitney ISP and, more importantly, how it happened, they will know what the museum did and who was complicit with them, and they will also know that the public act of mourning Palestinian lives was so threatening to them that they had to invent some spurious claim about harassment to prevent that from taking place. The ISP has been supposedly “paused” when it was living up to its full promise.

My response to the cancellation of the performance might have been to stage it in the park on the scheduled date. But this was not my decision to make. The censored artists had the final word.  Artists Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, Fadl Fakhouri and Noel Maghathe decided to put the score of the performance in the gallery, in this way signaling and intensifying a gap and a silencing. They used this cancellation as a placeholder for something much larger and did it in a very powerful way. They wrote:

Myself [Fargo Nissim Tbakhi], Fadl Fakhouri, and Noel Maghathe were scheduled to perform these scores as part of the Whitney ISP Curatorial Fellows’ exhibition a grammar of attention on May 14th, 2025. This performance was cancelled by the Whitney.

We are now making these scores publicly accessible so that you may perform them in whatever space you choose. This work is not a work of art to be held inside the boundaries of an institution or a gallery. It is a means by which we might mourn and fight back against the brutality of the world.

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.

The cancellation speaks directly to what is happening to Palestinian lives in the US.

It was the artists’ choice. The curatorial cohort, who had commissioned that performance, wrote their statement in support of the artists and condemning the cancellation. Then the writers who were going to do the symposium—which was going to consist of critical, performative and poetic interventions—decided not to to go through with it in protest. They canceled the symposium and wrote a courageous statement. Then most of the artists of the studio chose to remove their work and wrote their own statement. They were all impressive.

They all wrote statements, and I supported them all. I knew I had to go last because they all had distinct voices and inflections, and we were producing an accumulation of dissent. So this is not me telling them what to do, that's a different style of leadership. They used their voices as  artists, writers, curators. My statement  supported them with absolute conviction and as an act of care. The ISP alumni also wrote a letter of support two weeks later with 500 signatories.

DW: You were supported by the ISP students?

SN-M: I was supported by them, and I supported them, it was reciprocal. But I also have to say, that all this—the writing of the statements and the pressure from the museum and the oppressive atmosphere of fear, and the fact that a lot of them are visa holders and gender dissidents—has taken a huge toll on them. We are also mourning the loss of a community though institutional violence. There will be no ISP in 2025-2026, the program has been allegedly “paused” by the Whitney, even though we went through a lengthy review with a five-member committee that reviewed 540 applications and conducted 50 interviews. The work was done and the list of admissions ready to go since early April. Yet no one has been admitted to the ISP and the museum, as far as I know, has not communicated with any of the applicants. The program, and certainly its independence, is at stake.

We had an inspired and inspiring year. Participants were writing zines together, collaborating and thriving as a community. The beauty of this collective experiment has been buried by institutional violence. I think a lot of them are quite depressed. Some of them are continuing to be activists and are very resilient. Some of them are just terrified, with their families being bombed in Iran and are working to get people out of Tehran.  One of the main collaborators for the video work “Inaudible” by Ash Monish, Ismail Abu Hatab, has just been killed in Palestine.

What really breaks my heart, why I came forward with public support despite the risks, is that I told them, the ISP is a safe space for the kind of difficult political conversations we are no longer having in academia. But the ISP wasn’t safe either in the climate of fear and suppression that dominates the country. Nowhere and no one is safe in US right now is unless we all come forward and strengthen the practice of solidarity and coalition building.

DW: There’s big money on the Whitney board, old and new money. There’s Tisch and Lauder and Hurst. A few people putting money into Israel and the arms race. Financiers. There’s the Democratic Party and the usual collection of well-connected lawyers and so on.

It’s shameful that you were fired. The articles I read didn’t even make clear you were fired.

SN-M: Because when the journalists called, the museum simply said, her position has been terminated. I've been fired with no explanation.

DW: What is your view of the contemporary New York art world?

SN-M: Often, artists come to New York to manage their careers rather than produce art. Young artists are struggling to survive here. I think a few spaces, like Woodbine in Ridgewood, the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program, Giorno Poetry Systems, Brief Histories, Participant, the Emily Harvey Foundation or Poetry Project, are doing really interesting work under very challenging circumstances. 

What was extraordinary about ISP was seeing how these artists, writers and curators were reacting to having a place where they could be together and think together. Some would say to me, especially after Trump’s inauguration, this is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It certainly was what kept me going, despite increasing challenges and pressures.

When I talk to young people and I see how isolated they are, how hopeless some of them are, and most of them are artists, I think it’s simply unforgivable. Because we are foreclosing the future. If New York doesn’t get its act together and open the door for these artists to be able to speak to one another, so that they’re part of something that is not just themselves, it simply becomes a competitive rat race.

Artists are producers and, when they make art, they are part of an entangled experience they cannot fully control. I care about this, the making of art. How do we make things? How do we think as a form of making? How do we understand making as an embodied form of thinking? This is interesting to me, vital in fact, because it expands what we are able to conceive of as possible. It is this that makes art political. 

DW: What has been your reaction to the situation in Gaza?

SN-M: To me, one of the striking things about Gaza is that it literally shatters the category of victim or perpetrator as fixed and absolute identities. We assume that if you have been a victim of a genocide, you cannot perpetrate one. But we can no longer sustain such an identitarian fallacy. There's also the problem of settler colonialism, imperialism, extractivism, plunder and generalized exploitation. Right now Gaza is a nexus of the lethal network of entanglements that capitalism truly is, and it is not the only one.

In my work, I argue that Europe's most enduring export is the violence of the border. Zionism takes on the disturbing exclusionism of the European nation-states that made refugees of Jews to begin with! We need to get rid of this notion of the sovereign nation-state, this obsession with the border and this obsession with self-enclosed identities, this notion of a subject that must be violently protected because he (it is very much a “he”) is always at risk, always in danger.