The Vera List Center for Art and Politics joins the Fall of Freedom day of action on May 1, 2026, coinciding with International Workers’ Day. Responding to this urgent call, which focuses on artistic labor in support of immigrants’ rights organizing, we have published a resource guide drawn from the VLC archive that examines colonial legacies built on forced displacement, alienation, and systems of control. 

This resource guide collects select lectures, conversations, essays, artist projects, and convenings presented by the Vera List Center since 2005—coinciding with our first Focus Theme: Homeland. This one-year research cycle foregrounded artistic methodologies for contesting, subverting, and otherwise using the term “homeland” in pursuit of an inclusive, equitable, and expansive definition of “home.” This guide highlights projects that explore the intersections of art and social justice in historical and contemporary conversations on migration, movement, labor, and power.

Contributions include current Matter of Intelligence VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa’s recent conversation with historian Quinn Slobodian that examines how IQ testing and perceived “intelligence” have been used to justify racial hierarchies and restrict migration. Diana SeoHyung’s “가는 길: Decision to Leave / On Leaving / Leaving” grapples with states of living between languages, and the forms of understanding that emerge from (mis)translation, while Maria Thereza Alves’s Seeds of Change considers the interspecies solidarities forged through the colonial displacement of people and plants.

We offer this guide to celebrate and make accessible artistic modes that challenge fixed notions of geography, identity, and belonging.

March 4, 2026
IQ Regimes: Race, Metrics, and Mobility
Conversation

IQ Regimes: Race, Metrics, and Mobility brings together VLC 2025–2027 Fellow Joyce Joumaa and historian Quinn Slobodian to examine the intersections of IQ, race, and migration, tracing the throughlines between early eugenic cognitive tests and today’s algorithmic decision-making systems that weaponize intelligence to regulate mobility and enforce racial and ethnic boundaries. 

October 18, 2025
Conversations with the 2025–2027 VLC Fellows and Special Guests
Conversation

As part of the VLC Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence, a series of conversations introduce the 2025–2027 VLC Fellows through thematic dialogues on converging on multiple aspects of intelligence. In Calibrated Intelligence, Joyce Joumaa, in conversation with scholar Meredith Broussard, explores the historical and ongoing entanglements of intelligence testing, racial classification, and technological control. Drawing on research into IQ testing performed on immigrants at Ellis Island, the conversation traces “calibrated” intelligence used to exclude and hierarchize human life. They also explore technological neutrality and Broussard’s “technochauvinist.” 

May 2025
가는 길: Decision to Leave / On Leaving / Leaving
Essay

For the Spring 2025 edition of Post/doc, Diana SeoHyung navigates “states of missing” between English and Korean. Jumping between disparate temporalities and vignettes—from picking her child up from school in New York to revisiting the Seoul apartment she lived in with her umma before immigrating to the US—SeoHyung remarks that “sometimes connection is closer to disconnection” when it comes to being and having a mother. As she works through a translation of Kim Sowol’s poem “가는 길” with a friend, SeoHyung finds a blueprint for understanding.  

June 3, 2024
Strike That
Seminar 

Strike That, part of the VLC’s Correction* Seminar Series, brings together visual artists, writers, and poets who critically reflect on changing language in the broader cultural and political landscape and in their own work, asking: How do we respond to crises while attending to the repair or recuperation of linguistic histories and legacies shaped by violence and dispossession? When do lexicons fail us, and when do they serve as tools for empowerment and resistance? With  Demian DinéYazhi’, Native American poet and activist; Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, a Palestinian-American performance artist and writer; and SA Smythe, a critical theorist, transmedia storyteller, and educator.  

October 2023
On Country: proppaNOW in conversation with New Red Order
Conversation

In “On Country,” members of the Aboriginal artist collective proppaNOW, recipient of the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, join Turtle Island-based public secret society New Red Order in a conversation on Indigenous sovereignty, connections to land and country, and the limitations and potentials of the global. Through this dialogue, the collectives respond to the ongoing effects of settler colonialism, while jointly envisioning a world beyond it.

April 2023
Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change
Monograph

For over 20 years, 2016–2018 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice recipient Maria Thereza Alves’s multidisciplinary project Seeds of Change has dissected the history of ballast flora, the displaced plant seeds found in the soil used to balance shipping vessels during the colonial period. This monograph, edited by Carin Kuoni and Wilma Lukatsch, brings together essays and archival materials connecting Alves’s project to themes of ecology, migration, and colonialism, offering a “borderless” perspective on intertwined environmental and human histories. Co-published by the Vera List Center and Amherst College Press, the book is available in print and as an open access ebook.

February 8–April 10, 2022
These Conditions
Exhibition

These Conditions by Adelita Husni-Bey is a pedagogical exhibition that parallels the contemporary public health crises to the history and politics of labor. Set within a staged, workshop-based environment conducted over Zoom, the project brings together essential workers to reflect on their lived experiences of pandemic labor conditions. Through performance, pedagogy, and collective discussion, it examines how “necessary work” is defined, managed, and exploited under capitalism. The exhibition portrays labor as both a site of care and extraction, showing how social systems depend on invisible, unevenly distributed forms of work.

November 8, 2021
As for Protocols Seminar 8: Work in the Cultural Economy We Want: Cooperatives
Seminar

Bringing together artists, organizers, and cultural workers to examine cooperative and worker-owned models as alternatives to extractive economic systems in the arts. Convened in collaboration with Caroline Woolard of Art.coop as part of the As for Protocols seminar series, the program focuses on how shared ownership and collective governance can build political, economic, and cultural power. Featuring contributions from Ramsey Nasser, Pia Mancini, and Daniel Park, the seminar highlights existing cooperative infrastructures—from artist-led initiatives to BIPOC-centered investment models.

October 2021
Vera List Center Forum 2021: As for Protocols
Catalogue

This publication accompanies the Vera List Center Forum 2021, celebrating the 2020–2022 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Recipient Avni Sethi, founder and curator of Conflictorium, a “museum of conflict” housed in Ahmedabad. The forum and publication also honor the work of the Jane Lombard Fellows, who are finalists for the Prize. Naeem Mohaiemen writes about Invisible Borders redefining global and local divides, and Nepal Picture Library reimagining traditional knowledge systems through archives. Salome Asega writes about the world-building of Detroit-based techno collective Underground Resistance; and Michelle Marxuach writes about Escula de Oficios‘ approaches to collective learning and embodied knowledge. 

April 22 & 23, 2021
NO WORK, NO SHOP
Laboratory 

NO WORK, NO SHOP: Socio-Environmental Imagination and Pedagogies of Action is a public program by 2020–2022 VLC Boris Lurie Fellow Etcétera. The lab brings together leading environmental thinkers, artists, collectives, and activists who counter prevalent models of transnational, resource extractivist industries, offering Buen Vivir, or “Good Living,” as an alternative approach to these developmental ideologies. Presented on Earth Day, it includes a short video animation and performative reading, which imagines beyond the neo-extractivist model can be heard, seen, and felt.

October 7, 2020
Borderlands
Conversation 

As part of the Vera List Center Forum 2020: As for Protocols, 2020–2022 VLC Fellow Carolina Caycedo, in conversation with Akimel O’odham poet Natalie Diaz, discusses her work on fair energy transition and environmental justice as part of her fellowship project. Emphasizing kinship with land, water, and human and non-human life as well as past, present, and future entities, the two consider how the lens of Indigeneity can be applied to further our understanding of the relevance of place, borders, and transitional spaces. 

October 2019
Tiffany Chung: The Vietnam Exodus Project
Essay

The Vietnam Exodus Project is an ongoing in-depth work by artist Tiffany Chung, a 2018–2020 Jane Lombard Fellow. The project uses interdisciplinary art and research methods to examine the damaging effects of the Vietnamese exodus and pursue changes in international asylum policy. In this text, Bela Star reflects on Chung’s project within the context of refugee crises across Asia, including Hong Kong and Syria, while connecting the project’s aims to broader conversations on statelessness, asylum, and policy. Watch Chung speak about The Vietnam Exodus Project in conversation with Star at the Vera List Center Forum 2019 and in her Parsons Visiting Artist Lecture, presented in collaboration with the VLC.

February 15 & 16, 2018
Toward Sanctuary Summits
Lecture & Workshop

Just over a year into US President Trump’s first term, the Vera List Center, in association with The New School Sanctuary Working Group, called for a public convening to debate this country’s legacy and current engagement with the notion of safe space, especially as it plays out in civic and cultural institutions. The keynote conversation features leaders from different cultural and civic realms in a frank reckoning of the current state of debate, and provides an outlook toward the second year of the present administration in Washington. They are Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; Jeanne van Heeswijk, artist and initiator of Philadelphia Assembled, and Laura Raicovich, former President and Executive Director, Queens Museum. The conversation is moderated by Alexandra Délano Alonso, Associate Professor and Chair of Global Studies at The New School, and Carin Kuoni, Director/Chief Curator, Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. 

February 14, 2018
Hyperallergic: How the Arts Can Help Immigrant Communities Through Sanctuary
Panel & Workshop

How the Arts Can Help Immigrant Communities Through Sanctuary convened artists, cultural leaders, a and policymakers to examine the role of cultural institutions in supporting immigrant communities amid escalating state violence and anti-immigrant policies in the United States. Organized by the Vera List Center in collaboration with the New School Sanctuary Working Group and the Zolberg Institute Working Group on Expanding Sanctuary, the program brought together participants including Laura Raicovich, Tom Finkelpearl, and Jeanne van Heeswijk to discuss the possibilities and limitations of “sanctuary” as both a symbolic and material framework.

2017
Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production
Book

Assuming Boycott features original contributions by artists, scholars, activists, critics, curators and writers examining four key areas: the historical precedent of South Africa; the current cultural boycott of Israel; freedom of speech and self-censorship; and long-distance activism. Far from representing withdrawal or cynicism, boycott emerges as a special condition for discourse, artmaking ,and political engagement.

October 16, 2017
New York Times TimesTalks with Ai Weiwei
Lecture

The artist Ai Weiwei delivers a lecture coinciding with his 2017 Public Art Fund exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors, a presentation that spanned all five boroughs of New York. Inspired by the international migration crisis and tense sociopolitical battles surrounding the issue in the United States and worldwide, Weiwei’s multisite project transforms the metal wire security fence into a powerful artistic symbol. The conversation is moderated by Vivian Yee.

March 11, 2017
Indigenous New York, Critically Speaking
Panel & Screening

Indigenous New York, Critically Speaking presents key findings from a day-long colloquium facilitating collaborations and exchanges among contemporary curators, artists, critics and scholars of Native America, First Nations, and Indigenous descent and their non-indigenous colleagues that focus on indigeneity and the legacy of colonialism and position the local as evidence of concerns shared globally. Organized in collaboration with artists Alan Michelson and Jackson Polys, the program explores themes such as land, visibility, and collective resistance. 

November 3–27, 2017
Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York—A Botany of Colonization
Exhibition

This exhibition celebrates the twenty-year project Seeds of Change by Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves, recipient of the 2016–2018 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice (formerly known as the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics). Seeds of Change examines colonialism, slavery, and the global commerce of goods through the lens of displaced plants in ballast—the waste material historically used to balance shipping vessles in maritime trade. Dumped in ports at the end of passages, ballast often carried “dormant” seeds collected from its place of origin that remained in the soil for hundreds of years before germinating and growing. Alves identifies the seeds as she looks at how plants trace the displacement of lands and people from the transatlantic slave trades. The exhibition was presented in conjunction with the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016–2018 Conference, a precursor to the Vera List Center Forum.

October 2017
A Botany of Colonization
Essay

In “A Botany of Colonization,” Maria Thereza Alves traces the movement of plants through ballast—materials carried by ships during colonial trade—as a way to uncover intertwined histories of migration, slavery, and environmental transformation. Focusing on New York’s port landscape, the essay reveals how displaced seeds mirror the forced movement of people and goods, arguing that colonialism is embedded in the land itself. 

October 2017
Sites as Citations of New York’s Colonial Past in Ballast
Essay

This curatorial essay by Carin Kuoni and Amanda Parmer accompanies Maria Thereza Alves‘s exhibition Seeds of Change: New York—A Botany of Colonization. The text traces how ballast—soil, stones, and organic matter used to stabilize ships in transatlantic trade—carried seeds across continents, embedding the histories of colonialism, migration, and forced displacement within the urban landscape of New York. Focusing on specific sites across the city, Kuoni and Parmer consider how so-called “non-Indigenous” plants function as living archives, revealing otherwise obscured histories of global commerce, slavery, and ecological transformation. 

November 3, 2017
Prize Ceremony and Keynote Conversation with Maria Thereza Alves and Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Keynote Conversation

A keynote conversation between Maria Alves and Ruth Wilson Gilmore at the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016–2018 Conference focuses on colonialism, migration, and environmental histories embedded in port cities. The discussion situates Alves’s 20-year project Seeds of Change within broader questions of racial capitalism, displacement, and the ongoing legacies of empire in contemporary landscapes and institutions. Moderated by the VLC’s Carin Kuoni.

November 21, 2017
Seeds of Change Lunchtime Reading
Talk 

Part of the bi-weekly lunchtime readings hosted by the Vera List Center in the context of Maria Thereza Alves’s exhibition Seeds of Change: New York—A Botany of Colonization. Organized in collaboration with The High Line, the readings activate and amplify the ecological metaphors embedded in the exhibition. Alex Smith and M. Téllez from Metropolarity—a DIY sci-fi collective based, bred, and tested in the colliding future-present of Philadelphia—presented a reading from their most recent publication Style of Attack Report. Other contributing writers include Wendy S. Walters, Patricia Klindiens and Jennifer Kabat.

October 2017
Transcending Movements: Weeds as Queering Species Boundaries 
Essay

In this essay, Marisa Prefer examines how “weeds” and “invasive” plant species challenge rigid distinctions between native and non-native life. Through queer ecology and environmental philosophy, the essay views migration as a process that includes plants, seeds, and ecosystems shaped by colonialism and climate change. 

October 2017
Forensic Architecture
Essay

This essay by Mariam Ghani, published as part of the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016–2018 Conference Companion, examines the work of the interdisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture, a finalist for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice (formerly known as the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics). Founded by Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture mobilizes architectural analysis, media technologies, and spatial reconstruction to investigate state violence and human rights violations. Engaging themes of surveillance, democracy, and the politics of evidence, the publication highlights how artistic and research-based practices can intervene in legal, media, and civic arenas to contest state power and advocate for justice.

October 2, 2017
An Evening with Gulf Labor
Panel

The Gulf Labor Artist Coalition is a group of international artists advocating for the rights of migrant workers building cultural institutions in Abu Dhabi. A finalist for the 2016–2018 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics, the group convened at The New School on the occasion of the release of their book, The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor in 2017. The event features reports by Gulf Labor members Nitasha Dhillon, Mariam Ghani, Amin Husain, Andrew Ross, and Gregory Sholette and focuses on the repercussions in the art world of oppressive labor policies in art institutions. They expand on their research and its implication for the work of artists and cultural producers everywhere.

October 2017
Gulf Labor
Essay

In “Gulf Labor,” Joanna Warsza examines the work of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition. The essay presents an intersection between activism, art, labor, and globalization, highlighting strategies such as boycott and institutional critique. It exposes the human cost behind cultural production, depicting artistic practice as a site of political engagement and collective responsibility.

October 2017
IsumaTV: Zacharias Kunuk
Essay

Written by Candice Hopkins, “IsumaTV: Zacharias Kunuk” examines the Indigenous media platform founded by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn. Developed to address inequalities in digital access, IsumaTV enables Indigenous filmmakers to share by developing online media players that operate on either low or high bandwidth, and by making their catalogue entirely free it has opened a link between audiences and producers from Indigenous and other nations around the world. 

October 24, 2016
Right of Refusal
Seminar

The right to refuse and the embrace non-participation are often overlooked in rights-based discourses. This panel discussion considers refusal as a possible strategy to challenge the erosion of liberal democracy. By framing resistance as a human right, the right of refusal invokes coordinated action, solidarity, and the law to magnify the political implications of individual decisions. Participants include Colleen Macklin, Associate Professor of Design and Technology, Parsons; Lucas Pinheiro, Lecturer in New Media Art History, Parsons; Joshua Simon, 2011–2013 VLC Fellow; and Pilvi Takala, artist.

October 22–November 11, 2015
Abounaddara. The Right to the Image
Exhibition

This exhibition and the accompanying conference celebrate the work of Syrian filmmaker collective Abounaddara, and its crucial contribution to transforming the dominant international media discourse on warfare, violence and migration. Abounaddara’s films actively work to restore a dignified image and voice to the Syrian people and aim to build new platforms for civil society to meet, regardless of national borders. Key to their artistic project is the specific political demand for an expansion of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to amend it with the right to a dignified image.

April 19, 2013
Your Food Is on Its Way
Screening & Conversation

Your Food Is on Its Way is a project by Annie Shaw on the livelihoods of delivery men in the food industry. It is accompanied by a newspaper published by the Vera List Center that features interviews with the delivery men, information on local grassroots organizing, and coverage of the Domino’s Pizza Workers Rally.

November 12, 2006
How Little We Know of Our Neighbours and A Map With Gaps
Screening, Film Program, Discussion

How Little We Know of Our Neighbours and A Map With Gaps presents two documentary works by Rebecca Baron and Alice Nelson that interrogate systems of observation, memory, and mapping. Baron’s film traces the history of Britain’s “Mass Observation” project and its transformation from social research into surveillance, while Nelson’s work reconstructs a fragmented journey through Soviet Russia through archival materials and narration. Together, the movies reflect on how states and institutions construct knowledge about people and places, and how gaps in archives and perception shape our understanding of history, migration, and belonging.

June 23, 2005
The Summit
Conversation & Panel

Introduced by Jonathan Bach is a presentation of the concepts of sovereignty, and the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of the modern nation state. Alongside a historical overview by cultural critic George Pendle, of utopian (and often failed) attempts to create new countries. And speakers, like Ambassador Raymond Loretan, Consul General of Switzerland in New York, artist Gregory Green (citizen of The New Free State of Caroline) and artist Eames Demetrios (Geographer-at-Large, Kymaerica), who shed light on the contemporary notions of nationhood and the rituals, objects, and symbolism associated with their countries.