We are excited to announce our fall 2026 line up of programming, kicking off year two of our 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence.

Through our annual VLC Forum, an exhibition, VLC Fellow presentations, seminars, and publications, we deepen our inquiry into intelligence as a subject with tangible, material implications. Probing topics ranging from collective knowledge and study to uncertainty and belief, we situate intelligence within natural, supernatural, human, and more-than-human realms.

Enjoy this preview of upcoming programming. For updates, visit our website or follow us on Instagram! Register in advance on the individual program pages.

FORUM
VLC Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence
Friday & Saturday, October 9 & 10
The New School and Livestreamed

The Vera List Center Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence explores the origins and implications of “intelligence” across species, systems, and societies through art and critical inquiry. Over two days, we convene with artists, curators, writers, scholars, and technologists to explore the many forms intelligence can take. The VLC Forum 2026 celebrates Rosana Paulino, recipient of the VLC’s 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, through an exhibition of her prize-winning project ¿História Natural?, a four-part Black Feminist Study Group, and the prize presentation and conversation between Paulino, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Diane Lima.

In a globe-encompassing presentation, alongside Paulino, the VLC Forum 2026 also highlights the Jane Lombard Fellows, who were finalists for the prize. They are: Nepalese art collective ArTree Nepal; New York-based artist Stephanie Dinkins; Hawaiian and Samoan digital media theorist and poet Jason Edward Lewis from Canada; and Finnish artist Jenna Sutela. In conversation with their nominators or invited guests, the fellows share their nominated projects and their engagement with the material and intangible dimensions of intelligence. Prize jury chair and curator Chus Martínez delivers the keynote lecture, and the annual Community Dinner, Dream Futures, gathers VLC Forum presenters and our community to imagine, rehearse, and enact collective futurity.

Other participants include Neta Bomani, Prabal Gurung, Mashinka Hakopian, Kite, Jessica Lynne, Moniki, Elvia Wilk, and Robbie Wing.

EXHIBITION
Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural?
October 9–November 1, 2026
Open daily 12–6 pm EDT, Thursdays late until 8 pm
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design
66 Fifth Avenue, New York

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics presents Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural?, an exhibition featuring the work of Brazilian artist and Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice recipient Rosana Paulino. Anchored by her landmark artist book of the same name, the exhibition traces Paulino’s critical examinations of the entanglements between science, race, gender, knowledge, and power. Published in 2016, the book ¿História Natural? and Paulino’s broader practice challenge the scientific, religious, and political ideologies that were weaponized to legitimize slavery across Brazil and played a central role in shaping the national project envisioned by Brazilian elites in the early 19th century.

The exhibition brings together new works and a selection of drawings, prints, and notebooks from the last several years, as well as rarely seen materials drawn directly from the artist’s studio. Together, these works chart the trajectory of Paulino’s practice since the making of ¿História Natural?, showcasing her growing poetic and conceptual breadth while affirming its significance across Brazil, the African diaspora, and other international contexts.

STUDY GROUP
Black Feminist Study Group
October 9, 17, 24, 31, 2026
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons School of Design
66 Fifth Avenue, New York

The Black Feminist Study Group is a four-part program shaped by the poetics and practice of Rosana Paulino. Assembled within Paulino’s prize exhibition ¿História Natural?, the study group is anchored by seminal texts that touch on interconnected struggles for liberation and resistance throughout the African diaspora. The weekly series commences on Friday, October 9, with the opening of Paulino’s exhibition. Rooted in the practice of collective listening and call and response, each study group session features an invited writer reading from a text of their choice from the reading list by another author, followed by a group discussion.

Writer and editor Jessica Lynne leads the first session, with a reading from Beatriz Nascimento’s The Dialectic Is in the Sea. New School scholar Cresa Pugh reads Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt, and interdisciplinary artist and founder of The Free Black Women’s Library, OlaRonke Akinmowo reads Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives.

MATTER OF INTELLIGENCE SEMINAR
Seminar 7: Intelligence, Uncertain
Monday, October 19, 2026
2–3:30 pm EDT
Online

Our Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series returns with Intelligence, Uncertain. If intelligence has always been a contested site—attributed, withheld, performed, disputed—misinformation and disinformation reveal the political stakes of that contest in their sharpest form. Presented in partnership with Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, this seminar explores uncertainty in the context of contemporary cultural, political, and technological transformations. HKW fellows Nora Al-Badri and manuel arturo abreu consider how artistic practice might engage these conditions by holding complexity, sustaining uncertainty without surrendering to it, and refusing false clarity without collapsing into relativism.

Stay tuned for announcements on additional Matter of Intelligence seminars this fall.

PARSONS VISITING ARTIST LECTURE
Joyce Joumaa: Provisional Recovery
Wednesday, October 28, 2026
7–8:30 pm EDT
Starr Foundation Hall, University Center, The New School
63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, New York

For the Parsons Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture, co-sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, 2025–2027 VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa shares recent and upcoming projects, including her VLC Fellowship project, Calibrated Alien. Joumaa’s practice begins from a simple but radical premise: that collapse is not an event to be witnessed but a condition to be inhabited, and that the image, once it ceases to document a crisis with a beginning and an end, becomes a technology for living inside one instead. What emerges from her work is less a documentary than a meditation on the impossibility of documentation itself, on the paradox of bearing witness to something that refuses, structurally, to conclude.

LECTURE & BOOK LAUNCH
Eyal Weizman: Ungrounding
Thursday, October 29, 2026
6:30–8 pm EDT
Wollman Hall, The New School
65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor, New York

Join Eyal Weizman, founder and director of Forensic Architecture, for a lecture and conversation with VLC Senior Director and Chief Curator Carin Kuoni to mark the launch of Ungrounding, his groundbreaking investigation into the relationship between violence, territory, and the built environment in Gaza and Palestine. Drawing on decades of forensic research, Weizman traces how architecture, infrastructure, and militarized landscapes have shaped histories of displacement and violence, offering a critical framework for understanding the present.

AICA-USA KIPPY STROUD DISTINGUISHED CRITIC LECTURE
Saidiya Hartman
Monday, November 30, 2026
6:30–8 pm EST
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
The New School, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York
In-person and livestreamed

Scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman delivers the 20th annual AICA-USA Kippy Straud Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Launched in 2007 in partnership with the VLC, the lecture series is an annual event during which an exemplary writer addresses seminal issues in contemporary art criticism.

Recent lecturers have been (in chronological order) Kellie Jones, Hilton Als, Valerie Cassel Oliver, Siddhartha Mitter, Legacy Russell, Carolina A. Miranda, Courtney J. Martin, Aruna D’Souza, Paul Chaat Smith, Negar Azimi, and Naomi Beckwith. Find recordings of previous lectures on our website.

DIGITAL PUBLISHING SERIES
Post/doc

The fall 2026 edition of our digital publishing series Post/doc centers on “Belief,” exploring modes of knowing that supersede logic or reason. Belief is an unshakeable truth—at least, from the perspective of the believer—that undergirds everything from religious doctrine and political institutions to the paranormal and conspiracy theory. When belief upends empirical knowledge, a question emerges: What does intelligence mean when belief is (mis)taken as tautological truth?

Contributors to the fall edition include New York-based artist and educator Gi (Ginny) Huo and Arkansas-based experimental pianist and composer Precious Renee Tucker. Explore past editions on our website.

CURATORIAL RESEARCH CHANNEL
Matter of Intelligence Are.na

The Matter of Intelligence Are.na is a research and publishing channel of the Vera List Center’s two-year Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. The channel is an iterative, continually expanding constellation of materials—spanning academic texts, artworks, and CIA Twitter posts, whether directly or obliquely related to intelligence—connected and activated across the VLC’s programmatic strands. It also reflects the ethos of Matter of Intelligence, grounded in a commitment to shared learning, collaborative research, the co-creation of knowledge, and an embodiment of collective intelligence.

BOOK FAIR
Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair
September 24–27, 2026
MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Ave, Queens

We are excited to participate in Printed Matter’s 2026 New York Art Book Fair (NYABF), the largest international gathering for the distribution of artists’ books. The fair will feature over 310 exhibitors, and we are thrilled to feature the latest VLC publications, including the VLC Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence catalogue and the third edition of the New York and Los Angeles editions of An Incomplete* Listing of Libraries, Reading Rooms, and Archives, as well as our recent anthologies As for Protocols (2025), Breaking Protocol (2023), Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change (2023), and Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech (2022).

Visit us for a 30% discount on all books (also explore our open access titles), in addition to free catalogues, posters, prints, and more.