This fall is different: We are pleased to announce our next season of programs and the first chapter of our 2022–2024 Focus Theme: Correction*, exploring the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction.” But we’re also celebrating a milestone in our history—thirty years of generative research, labor, and commitment to the field of art and politics at the Vera List Center!

We begin the semester with the first Correction* Seminar—Ashes to Artifact: Cultural Death, Repair, and Restitution of the Benin Bronzes. Bridging theory and practice, each online seminar in the two-year series Correction* unfolds through three distinct research clusters every semester set to guide our joint investigation into Institutional Critique, the Body, and Carcerality.

From October 20 through 22, we present the 2022 Vera List Center Forum, our international, annual convening where we assemble our 2022–2024 cohort of VLC Fellows and announce the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Recipient and Fellows. With an exhibition, lectures, performances, and a concert, we look back at transformative moments in our thirty-year history to envision the pasts and potential futures of art and politics.

We’re excited to present additional projects this fall including online and in print publishing initiatives, the sixteenth annual AICA Distinguished Critic Lecture, and a screening of our 2020–2022 Fellow Adelita Husni Bey’s VLC fellowship-commissioned project looking at the history and present of pandemics.

Join us online and in-person this fall!

SEMINAR
Correction* Seminar 1: Ashes to Artifact: Cultural Death, Repair, and Restitution of the Benin Bronzes
Monday, September 26, 2022
6–7:30 pm EDT 
Online
We launch the Correction* series with Seminar 1—Ashes to Artifact: Cultural Death, Repair, and Restitution of the Benin Bronzes. For this seminar, Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School, explores the return of the Benin Bronzes and what it means to attempt to overcome more than a century of imperial violence against this collection of artifacts and their descendants. Pugh’s lecture is punctuated by poetry readings by Nigerian poet Inua Ellams.

FORUM
VLC Forum 2022: Correction*
Thursday through Saturday, October 20 through 22, 2022
In-person at The New School and livestreamed
This year’s VLC Forum is organized within the framework of our two-year Focus Theme, Correction*. We present the 2022–2024 Vera List Center Fellows, announce the recipient of the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize Recipient and Fellows (finalists for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice), and celebrate the Center’s history of art and politics. Highlights include a conversation on women-founded organizations; the 30th anniversary keynote by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, and a concert featuring performances by jazz trio Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, preceded by a celebratory dinner for all, Viva Vera!

PUBLISHING
VLC Publications
In print and online
Beginning this fall, our reinvigorated online publishing platform brings together artists and writers who respond to the theme of Correction*. Commissions by writer, poet, and curator danilo machado and artist and poet Jason Lipeles bridge ideas of language with the practical and conceptual potentials of the asterisk. Other forthcoming publications include 2016–2018 Jane Lombard Prize Recipient Maria Thereza Alves’s monograph Seeds of Change (Fall 2022), the second title in our newly launched publishing partnership with Amherst College Press—following Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech, which is now available in print and online. Read more about our past and future publications here.

SEMINAR
Correction* Seminar 2 with Artist and Filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang
Monday, September 26, 2022
6–7:30 pm EDT 
Online

LECTURE
AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture
Monday, December 12, 2022
6:30–8 pm EDT
The New School
In-person and livestreamed
Previous lecturers in the Distinguished Critic series have been Legacy Russell, Carolina A. Miranda, Courtney J. Martin, Aruna D’Souza, Paul Chaat Smith, Negar Azimi, Naomi Beckwith, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Lucy Lippard, Michelle Kuo, Peter Schjeldahl, Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Linda Nochlin, and Michael Brenson. Stay tuned for the announcement of this year’s Distinguished Critic and, in the meantime, visit our archive to watch previous lectures here.

SCREENING
Adelita Husni Bey: Film Premiere
Thursday, December 15, 2022
7–8:30 pm EDT
The New School
In-person and livestreamed
2020–2022 VLC Fellow Adelita Husni Bey premieres her VLC Fellowship commissioned film These Conditions (working title), following an eight-week long workshop held between February and April 2022 at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, an ex mass vaccination site. A group of workers forced to work in person during the pandemic and students who saw their lives upended, met in an ad hoc, hybrid space that served both as a film set and a pedagogical site to explore organizing and insurrection during a time of mass death. The resulting film is a look into the current pandemic and its aftermath from a larger, historical and artistic framework.

ANNOUNCEMENT
Apply for the Borderlands Curatorial Fellowship!
Applications due September 15, 2022
We are pleased to announce the Borderlands Curatorial Fellow position starting in Fall 2022 through Spring 2023. The Borderlands Artist Fellowship is a collaboration between the Vera List Center and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University that supports artistic research projects that create communities across different geographical, cultural, and political landscapes. For the Borderlands Curatorial Fellowship, we seek an emerging, Indigenous curator to work closely with the two 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellows, Beatriz Cortez and Fox Maxy, whose projects will focus on the relevance of place to reflect on questions of borderlands. Learn more below and email vlc@newschool.edu to apply.

NEWS
VLC Networks
The Vera List Center aims to bring you exciting news and announcements from its global network of artists, scholars, activists, and organizations within the VLC community.

Join our 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow Beatriz Cortez on September 8 for her artist talk “Making Work for Williams College,” presented in conjunction with Cortez’s research into the visible and invisible histories within the built environment of the Williams College campus, which will manifest into a site-specific exhibition of her work opening in 2023.

Arizona State University Art Museum presents New Earthworks, a group exhibition featuring the work of eight contemporary artists envisioning new modes of addressing climate change and environmental equity through Indigenous perspectives (open through September 25). Our 2020–2022 Borderlands Fellow Carolina Caycedo‘s 2018 video Apariciones/Apparitions is included in the exhibition. Writing about Caycedo’s work, Art in America contributor Travis Diehl observes, “The piece is remarkable as an exorcism of a certain kind of stolen ‘worked’ earth, and a functional land acknowledgment.”

On the subject of climate, Serpentine’s interdisciplinary program Back to Earth addresses the ongoing climate emergency through collaborations with over sixty leading artists, architects, writers, filmmakers, scientists, and designers. Among those included are Maria Thereza Alves, Black Quantum Futurism, Carolina Caycedo, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others.

Our 2020–2022 Boris Lurie Fellow Etcétera recently opened an exhibition, IMPRESIONES ERRADAS: Una selección de obras, acciones e intervenciones erroristas, a través del archivo gráfico y audiovisual del Etcétera (WRONG IMPRESSIONS: A selection of erroneous works, actions and interventions, through the graphic and audiovisual archive of Etcetera) at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires.

The artist-run space Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research (co-founded by 2018–2020 Jane Lombard Fellows Emily Jacir, Annemarie Jacir, and Yusuf Nasri Jacir) invites applications to submit a proposal for a newly-commissioned project for their Land Program to activate at Dar Jacir in Bethlehem (applications due September 1).

2018–2020 VLC Fellow Helene Kazan was awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for her project Frame of Accountability: (Un)Touching Ground (2022), a multi-part experimental film project that investigates “risk” as a condition produced through capitalist financial systems and violent modes of conflict.

2015–2017 VLC Fellow Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s work is currently on view in Manifesta 14 in Prishtina, Kosovo. Open through October 22, the biennial aims “to support the citizens of Kosovo in their ambition to reclaim public space and to rewrite the future of their capital as an open-minded metropolis in the Balkans and in Europe through the development of a new cultural institution.”

Art Resources Transfer (ART) recently launched a new teaching guide centered around the work of 2004–2005 VLC Fellow Walid Raad, whose practice concerns archiving, storytelling, and performance. As Raad questions the extent to which documentation of historical events can ever capture the “truth,” this teaching guide invites learners and educators to consider how individual experiences are taught, archived, and remembered.

1999 VLC Fellow Kobena Mercer‘s new book Alain Locke and the Visual Arts delves into the legacy of Harlem Renaissance leader, his relationship with so-called “primitive” African sculpture, and the “queering of the New Negro.” The New Yorker‘s Julian Lucas writes about the book in relation to artist Isaac Julien‘s current installation Once Again…(Statues Never Die) at the Barnes Foundation, which also unpacks Locke’s connection with African material culture.

Finally this November, the New Museum opens Young Lords and Their Traces, the first museum survey exhibition dedicated to 2012 Jane Lombard Prize Recipient Theaster Gates that explores the artist’s interdisciplinary approaches to sculpture, architectural histories, social practice, collaborative performance, and archiving.