Announcement

THE VERA LIST CENTER FOR ART AND POLITICS ANNOUNCES ITS 2022–2024 FELLOWS

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School announces the appointment of five fellows under its 2022–2024 program cycle: Carmen Amengual (Los Angeles); Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago); Boris Lurie Fellow Omar Mismar (Beirut, Lebanon); and Borderlands Fellows Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles) and Fox Maxy (San Diego).

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 feature films 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.

“Through the VLC Fellowship initiative, we commit to bringing recognition and resources to visionary artists who might struggle to find support elsewhere because of the experimental, political, and/or research-intensive nature of their work; those who advance equity, inclusion, and social justice–often in a local context–through their artistic practices; and those who are members of underrepresented communities within the art world,” said Carin Kuoni, Senior Director and Chief Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

Kuoni added: “Despite the challenges of the pandemic, the last two years have been a time of exciting growth for our fellowship program. We have been able to make more resources available to our fellows and to support bolder, more ambitious research projects that have been presented to the public through new commissions: exhibitions, symposia, publications, and performances.”

Vera List Center fellowships are low-residency, two-year engagements during which the fellows research and develop their projects drawing from the curatorial, academic, and professional resources of the Vera List Center, its extended network, and The New School faculty and students. A graduate student provides them with dedicated research support. The Boris Lurie Fellowship, made possible with support from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, is named after artist Boris Lurie (1924–2008), and honors an artist from outside the United States who has experienced political hardship. The Borderlands Fellows, jointly appointed with the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (CIB), additionally benefit from the CIB’s unique Indigenous-focused context and resources at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Each fellow receives a $15,000 research award and additional production and presentation support to bring the project to the public through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary programs and organizational networks. Their appointments begin in October with presentations at the Vera List Center Forum 2022 and run through Spring 2024.

The Vera List Center Fellowships support individuals whose work advances the discourse on art and politics. Launched in 1993, a year after the VLC’s founding, the fellowship has placed artists at the heart of the Center’s activities. The program has supported thirty-nine distinguished artists and scholars, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Maurice Berger, Jill Magid, Lorraine O’Grady, Walid Raad, and most recently, Carolina Caycedo, Etcétera, Maria Hupfield, Adelita Husni Bey, and Rasheedah Phillips (Black Quantum Futurism).

“The 2022–2024 awardees, who join an already illustrious alumni group, exemplify some of the most powerful and urgent artistic practices and political questions of our time and what is at stake for culture, society, and our democracy,” said Eriola Pira, VLC Curator. “We are proud to have been trusted to be a part of their vision and look forward to providing transformative, critical support from ideation to artistic production and presentation.”

Added Kuoni: “This new cohort of groundbreaking artists and activists joins us at a transformational time in the Center’s history—our 30th anniversary—inspiring us to follow them into new and diverse fields and geographies and affirm the power of art in imagining and enacting radical and joyous futures. In doing so, they chart our course for the next two years and well beyond it.”

Beginning with its 2020–2022 cycle, the Vera List Center expanded its fellowship cohort with the Boris Lurie Fellowship and the Borderlands Fellowships. This year’s fellows were selected from among 390 applicants from seventy-three countries through a rigorous selection process that included an advisory panel of curatorial peers, former fellows, New School students and faculty, and experts on the Vera List Center’s board. The advisory committee included Juana Berrío, curator and Adjunct Professor in Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts; Dean Erdmann, 2018–2020 VLC Fellow; Aryana Ghazi Hessami, VLC Graduate Student Fellow, Anthropology PhD candidate, The New School for Social Research; Norman Kleeblatt, independent curator and critic, President, AICA-USA, VLC Board Secretary; Carin Kuoni, Senior Director/Chief Curator, VLC; H. Lan Thao Lam, 2009–2011 VLC Fellow, Assistant Professor of Fine Arts, Parsons; and Eriola Pira, Curator, VLC.

The Borderlands Fellowship, now in its second cycle, is an initiative of the VLC and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University to support research projects that create communities across different geographical, cultural, and political landscapes. Borderlands Fellows were selected from a pool of invited applicants nominated by experts in the field. The selection panel included Carolina Aranibar-Fernandez, artist, Arizona State University; Natalie Diaz, Director, Center for Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University; Anna Flores, MFA Poetry candidate, Arizona State University; Maria Hupfield, artist and curator, 2020–2022 Borderlands Fellow; Carin Kuoni, VLC Senior Director and Chief Curator; and Tania Aparicio Morales, VLC Graduate Student Fellow, Sociology PhD candidate, The New School for Social Research.

MEET THE VLC FELLOWS!

Carmen Amengual, Los Angeles, 2022–2024 VLC Fellow
Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina, whose work examines the interstices between memory, biography, and history. A Non-coincidental Mirror fabricates a memory for a forgotten event: the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algiers, 1973–Buenos Aires, 1974), while exploring a failed documentary project, which the organizers intended as a tool to educate a Latin American audience about anti-colonial struggles in Africa. Learn more about Amengual’s fellowship project here. 

Beatriz Cortez, Los Angeles, 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores simultaneity, different temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. Cortez’s VLC Fellowship project considers the Tierra Blanca Joven, the layer of ash deposited by the fifth century C.E. eruption of the Ilopango volcano, as sacred land with spiritual meaning to people who have migrated and continue to migrate from the Central American region to other territories. Learn more about Cortez’s fellowship project here.

Fox Maxy, San Diego, 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow
Fox Maxy is a film director and artist from San Diego. Watertight, her first feature film, is an artwork about mental health and suicide, about what harms and heals. Watertight is a hybrid documentary, casual group interviews intertwined with narrative scenes serving as surreal commercial breaks. Read more about Maxy’s fellowship project here.

Omar Mismar, Beirut, 2022–2024 Boris Lurie Fellow
​​Omar Mismar is a Lebanese visual artist whose project-based practice is materially loose and conceptually driven. Revolution is a Frown Gone Mad investigates the rampant culture of Botox in Lebanon as an extension of war and the witnessing of perpetual violence. The project raises fundamental questions about the aesthetics of disaster, reframed as a discourse on the sensuous body and the anesthetization of the body politic. Learn more about Mismar’s fellowship project here.

Anna Martine Whitehead, Chicago,  2022–2024 VLC Fellow
Anna Martine Whitehead is a Virginia-raised Chicago-based performer, artist, and writer interested in Black queer temporalities. FORCE! an opera in three acts, is a world-buliding and Black femme story of interior lives and shared dreams that examines relationships and sisterhood that bloom in the shadow of prisons and the prison industrial complex. Read more about Whitehead’s fellowship project here.