Artist Janiva Ellis Pulls out of Harvard Talk in Protest of School

Artist Janiva Ellis said on Tuesday that she would pull out of a talk she’d been scheduled to give at Harvard University amid scrutiny over a variety of recent developments at the school, including reported attempts at conciliation with the Trump administration, which earlier this week threatened to pull billions of dollars in funding from the school.

Ellis is currently the subject of a solo show at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, a contemporary art museum run by Harvard and located on its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was to give a talk with art historian Rizvana Bradley, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley who also said she would no longer speak at Harvard in a joint statement made with Ellis.

In that statement posted to Instagram, Ellis and Bradley attributed their decision not to appear for their planned event to a number of factors. They mentioned the dismissal of the leaders of the school’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, whom school officials claimed had crafted an imbalanced program when it came to Palestine-related matters, and denounced Harvard’s recent decision to sever ties with Birzeit University in the West Bank, something that a Harvard Crimson op-ed also recently advocated against.

Ellis and Bradley also mentioned what they described as “potential infringement” on the school’s African and African American Resistance Organization, whom Harvard recently accused of violating university policy.

They also addressed university president Alan M. Garber’s letter to the Trump administration, which addressed allegations that the school had failed to respond to antisemitism amid pro-Palestine activism on campus. With Trump threatening to pull $9 billion in federal funding from Harvard, Garber sent a letter attempting to reach a “resolve” with the President’s administration, according to the Boston Globe. Ellis and Bradley said that letter was “a capitulatory orientation.”

“We cannot participate in an event taking place at a university that has chosen to repress academic freedom, to target minority faculty, and to silence dissent,” Ellis and Bradley wrote. “Solidarity with those who face oppression is crucial, and we stand firmly with those advocating it.”

The talk was initially set to take place on Thursday, several days before the end of Ellis’s Carpenter Center show. A note on the Carpenter Center website says that the talk was canceled; another page hosted on the university’s website has been removed.

A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.