Announcement

Emerging from our 2022–2024 Focus Theme Correction*, which called for adjustments, revisions, and repair, we are pleased to announce that the VLC will enter a sabbatical period spanning fall 2024 through spring 2025. By postponing our next Focus Theme by a year, we’re piloting a longer runaway between curatorial cycles, with the aim of creating more space for in-depth reflection, research, connection, and planning. This approach will inform the upcoming Focus Theme, which will launch in September 2025. It will  refine the processes and protocols of our work as a team, as collaborators with other organizations, and as part of a thriving field of politically engaged arts organizations aiming to further ecologically sustainable practices. 

Inspired by the research- and service-focused sabbaticals of university faculty as well as agricultural  practices of letting land lie fallow, this initiative, spearheaded by curator and director of programs Eriola Pira, introduces a period of latency and reflection, taking time to reset and recalibrate the VLC’s rhythms and programmatic cycles. It is an opportunity to be experimental and responsive to artists’ needs and emerging cultural and political realities.

We are inspired by growing demands within the art sector, starting with the email signatures and automatic out-of-office responses of two recent VLC Fellows, Anna Martine Whitehead and Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism, among many other artists and disability activists,  who compel us to resist the dominant and unsustainable culture of immediacy and instead operate from a place of temporal abundance and care. What would it mean for an institution to move at the pace of artists? What does an institution at rest look like? How do we reduce our rapid tempo of activity and resist demands for hyper-productivity and visibility in the arts? What if time is our greatest resource?

These questions echo philosophical and political calls for degrowth, the slowing down of production and consumption to a level that aligns with restorative ecological systems. Our sabbatical year intends not merely to amplify these dialogues but to enact them politically as part of our curatorial vision and institutional practices of care for our community of artists, cultural workers, and the public. As such it is not a programmatic framework as much as a working one: we don’t want to talk about slowness, we want to slow down. Between the expansionist growth and accelerationist paradigm, and the impossibility of stopping altogether, we find a space of possibility and resistance in slowing down and taking time. 

And so, we’re taking our time, stretching and expanding the timescales of artist projects and our Correction* related work. In fall 2024, the harvest season, we gather the abundance of knowledge, lessons, and relations generated by two years of Correction* starting with the annual VLC Forum. Save the date, October 24-26, for a gathering of artists, scholars, and activists, who consider altered or revised histories under the heading of Correct History*. Anna Martine Whitehead returns with the fully realized New York City premiere of FORCE! an opera in three acts, co-presented by the Chocolate Factory Theater in November. With Smack Mellon, in December, we co-present VLC Fellow Carmen Amengual’s A Non-Coincidental Mirror, a film installation that traces a little explored event in the cultural history of Global South solidarities. And Hilton Als delivers the seventeenth annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School. More details to follow! 

In spring 2025, we sow the seeds for our 2025-2027 Focus Theme, launching in September 2025 alongside our next cohort of fellows and the next Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice recipient and finalists. The sabbatical will see the development of two new anthology publications and the release of the As for Protocols anthology, which will be ready for pre-order this fall. Throughout the year, we’ll take time for and center research, writing, editing, reconnecting and relationship building with artists, partners, funders, extended communities, and the public—the often invisible, but essential  internal work of sustaining an organization like the VLC.

This transformative direction for our organization is prompted by the nature of our work—research-intensive and artist-driven projects spanning two or more years—but also the broader  political, social, economic, and ecological challenges ahead unfolding on local, national and planetary scales, including dwindling support for critical arts-based social justice initiatives. As we evaluate and recalibrate our work and resources so they are as strategically meaningful as possible, the question then becomes: can we do less, together? And not, how to do more with less? This requires that we retreat not only to replenish and restore our capacities and reserves. That this retreat coincides with a national election that threatens hardwon liberties and democracy in the US, and nearly a year into a genocide unfolding in Gaza, atrocities in Haiti, Congo, and Sudan, and war in Ukraine, only strengthens our resolve to slow down, take time, and re-organize in and outside our institution to emerge resilient and with renewed purpose.

In parallel with our five-year 2022-2027 long-range plan, this temporary break from our regularly scheduled programming, allows for structural and programmatic reappraisals; experiments with unconventional methodologies and formats; and reflections on our fellowship and exhibition timescales; ongoing curator-artist relationships, emerging ideas, and critical exchange with multiple stakeholders. This, we hope, will shape our organization and field beyond this year.

This all feels aspirational, an experiment of sorts. But the unpredictable is also what we want to make space for, normalize, in our curatorial work and field. We have been inspired, encouraged, and supported by many artists, colleagues and like-minded art organizations in envisioning and developing this exploratory, commonning, and solidary work. Reach out if you’d like to talk to us about our experience or join our efforts towards transformative change. Throughout the year, we’ll share resources, our process, and lessons learned on this page so follow along. 

We are deeply grateful to the VLC Board members, to The New School, individuals, and to public and private foundations that make our work possible, especially the Mellon Foundation and The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts for their recently renewed commitment and support. You too can support our work by joining Vera’s List, our giving circle for donors at any level, today. 
With care,

VLC Staff