Whitney Names New Director of Independent Study Program
The Whitney Museum of American Art has appointed Soyoung Yoon as the new director of its Independent Study Program (ISP) after the museum suspended the tuition-free fellowship for the 2025–26 year. Yoon, a former Critical Studies fellow in the 2006–07 ISP cohort and a regular visiting faculty member, has taught at Purchase College and the New School and served as Master’s program director for Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, while also completing a PhD in art history at Stanford University. Her appointment follows controversy after the Whitney canceled the 2024–25 Curatorial Studies fellows’ planned staging of “No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance,” a work on Palestinian mourning by Noel Maghathe, Fadl Fakhouri, and Fargo Tbakhi, and later terminated ISP associate director Sara Nadal-Melsió and dissolved her role. The ISP, founded in 1968 by Ron Clark, counts alumni including Jenny Holzer, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Roberta Smith, Mark Dion, Gregg Bordowitz, Emily Jacir, Julian Schnabel, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Glenn Ligon, and Naomi Beckwith.
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This story was covered in Safe Markets, Culture Wars, and Queer Reframing