Crackdown Culture: A Year of Suppressing Pro-Palestinian Art Students

The past year has seen sustained protests in response to Israel’s US-backed war on Gaza, with artists, students and cultural workers playing an important role in demanding accountability and solidarity with Palestinians. In the US, walkouts, open letters, teach-ins, exhibition withdrawals, encampments and other direct actions have reverberated across the art world and its institutes of higher learning, exposing the uneasy relationship between political expression and institutional control. A recent cancellation of a performance organized by participants in the Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) underscores how fraught that relationship has become, highlighting the pressures that cultural institutions face and often reinforce amid calls for demilitarization and artistic freedom.

On 12 May, just two days before it was scheduled to take place, the Whitney Museum in New York cancelled a planned performance of No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance (2024). Made by artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe and Fargo Tbakhi, the work employs written ‘scores’  by Natalie Diaz, Christina Sharpe and Brandon Shimoda to mourn the more than 50,000 Palestinian lives lost in the war. The performance was due to form part of an exhibition mounted by the curatorial cohort of this year’s Whitney ISP, a self-proclaimed ‘experimental study community dedicated to fostering critical thinking’ under the auspices of – albeit independent from – the museum.

The Whitney cited concerns over Tbakhi’s introduction at one of the performance’s earlier iterations, hosted in October 2024 by The Poetry Project in collaboration with Jewish Currents magazine. Following the cancellation, both curators and artists issued statements in response to the museum’s position; the associate director of the ISP, Sara Nadal-Melsió, called it ‘unprecedented censorship’; and ISP participants withdrew their work from the capstone exhibition and called off a planned symposium. On 23 May, protesters occupied the museum during a pay-what-you-wish evening, denouncing ‘artwashing’ and board ties to arms manufacturers: part of a broader wave of cultural and campus actions challenging institutional complicity in the war and demanding accountability for Palestinian lives.

The cancellation is not entirely surprising, and not only because the ISP and the museum have a historically contentious relationship. As recent campus protests have highlighted, the intensifying demand on institutions to take clear political stances has led to heightened scrutiny, public backlash and renewed debates over censorship. Over the past year, thousands of students in the US have been arrested for peaceful protest; others have been censored, harassed, suspended, expelled or had their degrees revoked. (Degrees have also been returned: on 15 May, art critic Aruna D’Souza announced she was giving back her New York University graduate degrees in solidarity with student protesters.) Of the schools to make headlines for pro-Palestinian protests, it’s notable that a number have been art schools. In May 2024, Parsons School of Design in New York became the first college in the country to have a faculty encampment. Less than a week after its formation, protesters, including faculty members, were arrested – around the same time as dozens were also apprehended at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

Also in May 2024, students at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence occupied a campus building, renamed ‘Fathi Ghaben Place’ after the Palestinian painter, to press the school to divest from Israeli companies. They were threatened with expulsion or arrest if they remained there. This spring, ‘To Every Orange Tree’ – a student-led exhibition themed around ‘anti-imperialist mindsets’, primarily organized by the RISD chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (RSJP), and featuring work by RISD students, staff and alumni – included a piece that depicted the occupation of the campus building and a print with the phrase ‘No rest until RISD divests’. Shortly after the show opened on 17 March, images of it were posted on the doxxing platform StopAntisemitism, and the university ordered that the work be moved to a private venue after allegedly receiving threats.

RSJP is in talks with galleries around Providence, as well as the local nonprofit community arts organization AS220, about restaging the exhibition. When asked about activism, a representative for RSJP told me that ‘energy on campus this year has shifted significantly due to increased repression and the targeting and disappearances of international students, RISD student visa revocation, the deportation of professor Rasha Alawieh from Brown University and the targeting of residents across Providence by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.’ The student added that RISD has threatened ‘to revoke scholarships over wheatpasting conduct violations’, which has ‘pressured students away from protesting’. Activists face an uphill battle as universities become increasingly hostile to protests and acts of solidarity for Palestine, passing new policies to clamp down on speech.

All of this takes on a particularly bitter flavour in light of a bombshell report, released by The New York Times on 18 May, about ‘Project Esther’. The brainchild of the Heritage Foundation – the ultraconservative think tank that helped architect the civil-rights rollback under US President Donald Trump – this self-proclaimed ‘blueprint to counter antisemitism’ was published on 7 October 2024, one year after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel and mere months before Trump took office. Placing great emphasis on universities and the media, it laid out a sweeping plan to punish critics of Israel’s war on Gaza – dubbed ‘Hamas Support Organizations’ (HSOs) – with an array of legal and social consequences, such as ‘HSO propaganda purged from curricula’, ‘HSO-supporting faculty and staff lose their credentials’, ‘HSO members in violation of student visa requirements’ and ‘HSOs no longer have access to US open society’. The New York Times revealed that, since Trump was inaugurated, ‘the White House and other Republicans have called for actions that appear to mirror more than half of Project Esther’s proposals’.

Instances of censorship and punishment – deportation, criminalization, academic sanctions – have reached a fever pitch in the past year. Far from isolated incidents, they are part of a systematic programme and disturbing trend, representing a broader attack on freedom of expression and the role that institutions of higher learning should play in encouraging critical thought and social change. Administrators of US arts education programmes of various stripes are currently more focused on preserving their financial ties and reputations than protecting students who speak out. But the right to protest, within and beyond art, is one we must urgently defend.

^{Main image: Pro-Palestinian students maintain a tent encampment in University Yard on the campus of George Washington University on 2 May 2024 in Washington, DC. Courtesy: Getty Images; photograph: Chip Somodevilla}