The Vera List Center was founded in 1992 in direct response to the pressing debates of the day on freedom of speech, identity politics, and public support of the arts. In this exhibition, we carve out five themes that continue to shape everything we do—democracy, knowledge, identity, ecology, and care. Each area is illuminated through archival and documentary material, tracking whether and how these debates and topics have shifted and evolved. As we identify common threads, we subject our own history to a self-critical course correction and challenge both archival and curatorial practices.

No Vera List Center program exists without art: Art and artists provide the radical, joyous, and forward-looking entry points to new understandings of these topics and inclusive political empowerment. Moroccan French artist and 2011–2013 VLC Fellow Bouchra Khalili returns to the VLC for this exhibition and presents her seminal project The Speeches Series for the first time in New York in its entirety. Consisting of three videos—Mother Tongue, Words on the Streets, and Living Labor—the installation includes a reading corner and interactive space for New School students and faculty.

Labor of Love: Vera List Center for Art and Politics at 30 is on view from October 17–November 27, 2022
and is open daily 12–6 pm ET, Thursdays late until 8 pm.

Featuring:

Lulani Arquette, President and CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (NACF), Center for Native Arts and Cultures, Portland; 

Jane Hait, founder, Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA);

Shani Peters, co-founder, The Black School;

and special guest Kathy Goncharov;

moderated by VLC Senior Director and Chief Curator Carin Kuoni.

As we celebrate our founder Vera G. List’s vision and chart new paths for the future of the Center, we look at art spaces emerging around us led by philanthropists and artists that take up the mantle of creating new environments for not only experimenting with and experiencing art, but also making room for new ways of doing so.

Featuring:

Wanda Nanibush, Curator, Indigenous Art, Art Gallery of Toronto.

The New School’s Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice is awarded by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics to an artist or group of artists in recognition of a particular project’s long-term impact, boldness, and artistic excellence. International in scope, it constitutes a unique meeting of scholars and students, the general public, and globally significant artists. Wanda Nanibush announces this cycle’s Jane Lombard Prize Recipient and Jane Lombard Fellows, each of whom are finalists for the prize.

Featuring:

Shuddabrata Sengupta, Raqs Media Collective.

Founded the same year as the Vera List Center for Art and Politics but halfway across the globe, the Raqs Media Collective has sustained a practice in media, contemporary art, and curation since 1992. In this illustrated 30th Anniversary Keynote Lecture, Raqs co-founder Shuddhabrata Sengupta speaks to the ways in which the constancy of practice requires its own acts of mending, of correction, and of changing course.

Featuring:

Matti Aikio, artist;

Carmen Amengual, artist;

Anna Martine Whitehead, artist;

Omar Mismar, artist;

Beatriz Cortez, artist;

and Fox Maxy, artist.

Looking towards the future of the Vera List Center, the third day of the Vera List Center Forum 2022 introduces the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows: Carmen Amengual (Los Angeles) and Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago); Boris Lurie Fellow Omar Mismar (Beirut, Lebanon); Sami Fellow Matti Aikio (Finland); and Borderlands Fellows Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles) and Fox Maxy (San Diego). In this first encounter with Vera List Center audiences, the fellows present on their distinct practices as they embark on developing their fellowship projects. 

Appointed under the VLC’s 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*, each of the fellowship projects—in form and content—explores the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction.” The fellowship projects, which range from a feature film to an opera, are in different stages of research and production. Each project takes speculative, poetic, critical, and activist approaches to correction, reconsidering existing histories, systems, and practices of correction as well as our relationship with it. Through their projects, the fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the VLC, now in its 30th year, and to the public’s understanding and engagement with creative practices and pressing issues through the lens of correction.

A joyous dinner on campus, before music engulfs us.

Bridging Vera List Center past and future, Angel Bat Dawid, who first presented at the VLC in 2020 as part of Training for the Not-Yet: Protocols in the Making and is a collaborator of 2022–2024 VLC Fellow Anna Martine Whitehead on their fellowship project, returns to The New School with Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty and an in-progress preview of Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts.