A wave of anti-Palestinian repression has swept the Western art world in the aftermath of October 7th, 2023. From Amsterdam to San Francisco, artists who have criticized Israel’s brutal war on Gaza have seen their exhibitions canceled, their work deinstalled, and other opportunities rescinded. Some of these incidents have been met with major backlash: After Vail, Colorado disinvited Native artist Danielle SeeWalker from a residency last May, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the town; months earlier, Indiana University’s cancellation of Palestinian American painter Samia Halaby’s retrospective made international headlines. In our extensive reporting at Hyperallergic on this phenomenon, we’ve seen that these high-profile cases are just the tip of the iceberg. In Miami Beach, for example, Oolite Arts removed an installation evoking the phrase from the river to the sea by Vietnamese artist Khánh Nguyên Hoàng Vũ, citing concerns from unspecified community members that the popular expression of support for Palestinian self-determination amounted to “a literal call for violence against them.” Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany canceled an exhibition section on Afrofuturism after guest curator Anaïs Duplan professed his support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement in a social media post.
Denying artists platforms due to their solidarity with Palestine dovetails with a broader project aimed at eroding the possibilities for challenging authority. In Europe, where states tend to provide robust support for the arts, funding may be conditional on toeing the governmental line. In the United States, where such public funding is comparatively scant, it is wealthy donors who commonly exert the most powerful political pressure on arts organizations. (Though increased legislative repression does appear to be on the horizon in the US: On November 21st, the House of Representatives passed a bill empowering the government to strip non-profits accused of supporting “terrorism” of their tax-exempt status. It is hardly a leap to imagine a Trump administration applying it with chilling effect to those engaged in Palestine solidarity work.)
When arts organizations depend significantly on private financing, the mechanisms behind cultural repression are often obscured. In our reporting, we have observed how the most visible members of an institution’s leadership—like museum directors or curators—often bear the brunt of public outrage, while stakeholders involved in top-level decision-making, such as low-profile board members, remain behind the scenes. For small nonprofits, where a single foundation grant or private donation can be the deciding factor in whether an exhibition goes up or even whether the lights stay on, leaders may be faced with a choice between disavowing their own values in a particular instance or risking broader detrimental implications for the projects they are committed to. That tension can be felt in the antiseptic statements these institutions issue attempting to explain their repressive acts, some of which read as though written through gritted teeth—or in their radio silence.
Still, many artists have rejected opportunities premised on abandoning the struggle for a free Palestine. In April, 11 Jewish artists pulled their submissions from an exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, calling on the institution to be fully transparent about their sources of funding and to commit to BDS. As Palestinian artist Rana Nazzal Hamadeh—one of several artists who cut ties with the Art Canada Institute in December 2023 after the nonprofit requested a last-minute “sensitivity review” of an exhibition featuring the work of Arab and Muslim artists—told Hyperallergic: “Arts institutions and museums create a canon that is seen as truth.” When they engage in the suppression of speech, “it is imperative that we refuse to patronize them or contribute our cultural production to them.”
Between institutional censorship and principled artistic refusal, exhibitions mounted since October 2023 have been meaningfully shaped by work not shown. Below are 13 works of art, either targeted by cultural entities or removed in protest during that time. By gathering what has been cast out or withheld, this curation tells a story of imaginative acts that contest the order of things—reminding us that there are worlds other than that most readily displayed, and they are not as out-of-reach as they are sometimes made to seem.
— Hrag Vartanian and Valentina Di Liscia
Editor’s Note: This article is co-published with Jewish Currents. Information in the captions is drawn from reporting published by Hyperallergic between November 2023 and September 2024. We are particularly indebted to the work of Hakim Bishara, Rhea Nayyar, Maya Pontone, and Matt Stromberg.
On January 20th, 2024, hours before the California Institute of the Arts MFA exhibition was set to open, seven participating artists withdrew their work. Laura Ohio, Zoe Josephina Moon, malavika rao, GIAHN, Jungsub Eom, lauren mcavoy, and Ásgerður “Ása” Arnardóttir explained that they removed their pieces after the UTA Artist Space, the Beverly Hills organization hosting the show, insisted that Zoe Moon edit her artist statement to excise a mention of the genocide in Palestine and denied requests by the others to amend their statements to include expressions of solidarity with Palestinians. “Painting has been a medium through which I have been able to envision what I want of the future,” malavika rao had written in her statement. “If I am mapping out a future world liberated from the structures of capitalism and colonization, then how can I do so without mapping out a free Palestine?”
In September 2024, Michigan State University abruptly moved artist Alia Farid’s Piquete en el capitolio to a less prominent wall in Diasporic Collage: Puerto Rico and the Survival of a People, the exhibition in which it was featured. The university also added additional signage near the show’s entrance without the curators’ consent, informing visitors that the exhibition contains a “depiction of protest signs that include controversial content” in reference to a photograph reproduced in Farid’s work. The image shows Arab refugees at a 1973 pro-Palestine protest outside of the capitol building in San Juan. The university also canceled a large event celebrating the opening of Diasporic Collage, as well as the openings of several other exhibitions at the university, including a show of work by the Palestinian American painter Samia Halaby.
On May 9th, 2024, the Town of Vail, Colorado announced that it would not be moving forward with its plan to host Danielle SeeWalker for a residency, where the Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta artist was scheduled to paint a mural engaged with Native American culture. The decision came after the artist turned her attention toward the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. In a public statement, the town clarified that it does “not use public funds to support any position on a polarizing geopolitical issue.” SeeWalker identified the incident as part of a broader wave of censorship, and told Hyperallergic that the town’s conditional support made her feel “tokenized.”
In March 2024, artists and collectors withdrew nine artworks from a textile exhibition at London’s Barbican Centre after the institution canceled a lecture by Pankaj Mishra entitled “The Shoah after Gaza,” in which the writer planned to discuss how the Israeli government has weaponized the Nazi Holocaust to legitimize its genocide in Gaza. Artists Yto Barrada, Cian Dayrit, Diedrick Brackens, and Mounira Al Solh requested that their work be removed, and collectors Lorenzo Legarda Leviste and Fahad Mayet pulled two quilts by Loretta Pettway—a member of the celebrated Gee’s Bend Collective—they had lent the gallery. The cultural organization Art Jameel subsequently rescinded its loan of a piece by the late Ivatan and Filipino American artist Pacita Abad. The Barbican replaced the works with panels explaining the reason for their removal.
In November 2023, at the behest of the artists, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC deinstalled a sculpture by Nicholas Galanin and Merritt Johnson from The Land Carries Our Ancestors, an exhibition of contemporary Native American art. Galanin and Johnson requested that the museum, which receives federal funds, remove their work “due to US government funding of Israel’s military assault and genocide against the Palestinian people.” They explained that the piece in question, Creation with her Children, “is a reflection on survival, resistance against colonization, the importance of continuum and connection to Land. The work we do as artists does not end in the studio . . . [I]t extends into the world.”
Art Canada Institute, a nonprofit online platform based at the University of Toronto, drew ire from artists and curators after it requested a last-minute “sensitivity review” of the works to be included in Lands Within, which featured landscape photography by North African and Southwest Asian Canadian artists. Rana Nazzal Hamadeh, a Palestinian Canadian artist with work in the exhibition, told Hyperallergic that the review was part of “a wave of denialism and censorship in arts institutions across Canada that targets Palestinians and those who voice even slight empathy with us.” After the exhibition’s curator expressed significant concerns, ACI agreed to forgo the review. Still, on November 28th, 2023, just hours after the exhibition went live, the featured artists collectively withdrew their consent for their work to be shown on ACI’s website and the exhibition was canceled.
On May 3rd, 2024, Oolite Arts removed a work by Vũ Hoàng Khánh Nguyên from a display in Miami Beach. The piece, which looked out from a Walgreens window, evoked the phrase From the river to the sea through the use of text, as well as images of the Jordan River and the Atlantic Ocean. Drawing on the artist’s connections with Florida and Vietnam, the installation invited passersby to consider the entangled crises of climate change, migration, genocide, and ecocide. “[T]he particular phrase highlighted in this piece is perceived by many as a literal call for violence against them,” the Oolite Arts board wrote in a statement, though they admitted that they wish they had “taken more time to have deeper conversations with the artist, our staff and other stakeholders about the work and our decision.”
In November 2023, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany canceled a section of the We Is Future exhibition devoted to Afrofuturism in response to guest curator Anaïs Duplan’s social media posts expressing solidarity with Palestinians. The museum’s director, Peter Gorschlüter, informed Duplan in an email that the museum considered his posts “unacceptable” because they “do not acknowledge the terroristic attack of the Hamas and consider the Israeli military operation in Gaza a genocide.” Further, Gorschlüter continued, the curator’s support for BDS campaigns contradicted a 2019 resolution by the German federal parliament condemning the Palestinian-led movement and put the museum in a situation where it could be seen as supporting “antisemitic tendencies.”
After protestors displayed a banner reading From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free at the opening ceremony of the 2023 International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), the festival and its artistic director issued a statement apologizing to festival goers impacted by the “hurtful slogan.” Several filmmakers, arts workers, and cultural organizations subsequently committed to boycotting the festival. Among them was filmmaker Jumana Manna, who withdrew her film Blessed Blessed Oblivion—which engages with performances of masculinity among Palestinian men in East Jerusalem—from an IDFA series. In a statement to Hyperallergic, Manna described the festival’s response as “a breach of trust for the community of filmmakers who attend and participate in the festival.”
Eleven anti-Zionist Jewish artists, organized under the banner California Jewish Artists for Palestine, withdrew work they had submitted to the 2024 California Jewish Open at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) in San Francisco. The group issued a statement to that effect after CJM informed the artists they would not meet the group’s demands, which included the ability to modify their works, control curatorial framing, and guarantee transparency of funding on the part of the institution. The artists also demanded “a full divestment from Israeli government funding and pro-Zionist foundation funding.” In a statement to Jewish Currents and Hyperallergic, California Jewish Artists for Palestine elaborated: “The purpose of our ongoing art action is singular: to hold our Jewish institutions accountable to using all available platforms and resources toward ending the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.”
The Center for Book Arts (CBA) in New York City withdrew an invitation to multimedia artist sister sylvester (also known as Kathryn Hamilton) to present The Eagle and The Tortoise, an audio and video installation that includes a collective reading of the story of a Turkish student named Deniz who becomes, successively, an icon of leftist resistance, an armed militant, a political prisoner, and a proxy soldier in an American war. A CBA representative informed the artist that “unfortunately the subject may be too closely aligned with the current conflict in Gaza for us to present the performance at the moment,” citing the need to ensure that everyone feel “comfortable using our studios.” sister sylvester and other artists who worked on The Eagle and The Tortoise told Hyperallergic: “We are living in a country that is funding the bombs that are dropping on Gaza. Discussion around this cannot be suppressed in the name of comfort.”
