The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is pleased to announce its 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence, and Open Call. Our newly envisioned Open Call, now spanning two rounds, is designed to welcome ideas and project proposals that find support and advance across a range of VLC’s programs and initiatives, including our signature fellowship program. 

As part of our sabbatical, a year of slowing down and recalibrating our institutional rhythms and programmatic reappraisals, the Open Call has been reimagined to better support and celebrate the richness and diversity of creative practice, scholarship, and knowledge of our extended communities, thus shaping our curatorial thinking, approaches, and programs throughout our two-year exploration of intelligence. 

With Matter of Intelligence, and an emphasis on forms of collective intelligence, this cycle of the Open Call places artists and their ideas at the forefront of our exploration from the outset, continually highlighting these voices and perspectives throughout the two-year inquiry. This approach builds on a solid history of past fellowship project proposals that have been successfully supported and presented through the center’s programs and publications.

Projects submitted in the first round will be considered for the VLC Fellowship, as well as a range of other programs, including the center’s seminar series, exhibitions, annual VLC Forum, and digital or print publications. A limited number of applications will advance to the second round and be invited to submit full proposals for fellowship commission projects. This new open call approach is designed to minimize the labor involved in the fellowship application, while continuing to engage and develop ideas and projects from the first round within the center’s programs. 

Fellowship project proposals creatively and rigorously approach the Focus Theme in content and form and make an intellectual and artistic contribution that advances the understanding of intelligence. Four two-year, non-residential fellowships will be awarded to commission and support scholarly and creative work that critically engages with the Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme: Matter of Intelligence. With support from the Mellon Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The VLC Producers Council, Vera’s List, and other donors, the VLC Fellowship stipend for this cycle has been increased to $25,000.

Vera List Center Fellowships support the development and presentation of ambitious art and research projects by national and international early or mid-career artists, writers, scholars, and activists, especially those who are members of underrepresented communities in the art world and those who struggle to find support because of the experimental, political, and/or research-intensive nature of their practice. The VLC Fellowship appointment is one of reciprocity and mutual benefits: VLC Fellows draw from the curatorial, academic, and professional resources of the Vera List Center and The New School, including faculty and students, as they contribute to the intellectual foundation of the Center. As commissions, the resulting VLC Fellowship projects are presented to the public through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary public programs and institutional networks.

For further information on the Fellowship Program, including eligibility, benefits, and terms and conditions, please visit our About page. To learn more about VLC programs and initiatives, such as our VLC Seminars, Exhibitions, VLC Forum, Publications, and Focus Theme, please visit www.veralistcenter.org.

2025–2027 Focus Theme

Where does intelligence start? Where does it reside? What forms does it take? Does it even exist? 

With new advances in artificial intelligence, these and other questions about intelligence and intelligent life are increasingly being asked, with a sense of urgency, as the promise and threats of AI loom large. For four semesters, we will tackle these questions and pose new ones that emerge from our engagement with intelligence—distinguishing it from consciousness and sentience—as perception, capacity, knowledge, and wisdom across species and places and over time. While definitions and theories about the nature of intelligence are hard to pin down, even among philosophers and psychologists—with many arguing it is a social construct that reproduces classicist, racist, and ableist hierarchies—it is its colloquial pervasiveness and currency as a concept that we are most concerned with.

Along with intelligence’s common derivatives and doublets—intel, intellect, intellectual, intellectualize, and intelligentsia—we chart its usage across more obscure, seemingly unrelated frameworks, from intellectual property and intelligence agencies to intelligent design. With intelligence as a lens, we examine how knowledge and power are intertwined and how epistemic tools are wielded to influence, control, favor, and subjugate. Invariably, these discussions encompass testing and standards of cognitive performance, arbitrary hierarchies of intellectual ability and superiority—bound with eugenics, ableism, racism, and cissexism. Against this biopolitical notion of intelligence, there are other forms of intelligence rooted in more experiential, communal, and just ways of being and knowing in the world, from Indigenous and spiritual epistemologies to those we associate with our nonhuman kin. 

Matter of Intelligence approaches intelligence as a subject of inquiry with tangible, material implications. It considers intelligence not just as an abstract concept but as something that manifests—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes and impacts our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. In an echo of its etymological roots in legere (Latin, to collect), two years of Matter of Intelligence at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics brings together and links different forms of intelligence, of being and knowing. Art provides the transdisciplinary lens for this expansive consideration of intelligence and its multiple manifestations, including art itself as intelligence and an intellectual activity.

Round I Matter of Intelligence – Have an idea? We’d love to know! 
This first phase welcomes project proposals responding to the Focus Theme: Matter of Intelligence. Are you working on or have an idea for a project you would like us to know about as we embark on a two-year exploration of intelligence? Projects are considered for the two-year VLC Fellowship, as well as a range of VLC programs, including the center’s seminar series, exhibitions, annual VLC Forum, and digital or print publications. Applicants will be notified if their application has advanced to the next round for the fellowship, if it is being considered for support and development through the VLC’s other programs and initiatives, or if it has been declined. 

January 6, 2025
Round I Applications Due

January 30, 2025
Notification of Advancement to Round II

Round II – Fellowship Proposals – Let’s take a closer look at your project!
Applicants who advance to this phase must submit a detailed project budget, timeline, and work samples for consideration for the VLC Fellowship, which will be reviewed by an ad hoc selection committee composed of VLC staff and Advisory Board members, past VLC Fellows, and New School faculty. Selection committee members make recommendations to the VLC team, who makes final decisions based on project feasibility, institutional capacity, and curatorial priorities. 

March 7, 2025 
Round II Fellowship Proposals Due 

March 30, 2025 
Fellowship finalists meet with the VLC curatorial team to confirm eligibility and fellowship requirements. 

May 2025 
Announcement of fellowship appointments.

October 2025
Vera List Center Forum 2025 and convening of 2025–2027 Vera List Center Fellows.

Dates subject to change. 

Apply by Monday, January 6, 2025, via Submittable 

For tech support, please contact support@submittable.com. 

For fellowship-related questions, please contact vlc@newschool.edu with “2025–2027 VLC Fellowship” in the subject line. No phone calls, please.