From November 3 to 27, 2017 the Vera List Center hosts a series of bi-weekly lunchtime readings in the context of Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York— A Botany of Colonization. These readings, organized in collaboration with The High Line, activate and amplify the metaphors and relations embedded in the exhibition.

Jennifer Kabat joins us on Thursday, November 16, for a reading of her recent essay “Rain Like Cotton,” published in BOMB this fall. With Seeds of Change, a long-term project Maria Thereza Alves initiated in 1999, the artist situates the presence of ballast flora in the contemporary landscape as evidence of alternative histories and ways of knowing the land we are inhabiting. In her words “The earth you think you’re standing on is not, it is someplace else, the only way you would know the place is from the flower.”

The readings in this series address the variegated intersections of Alves’ project and those of contemporary writers including: Wendy S. Walters, Patricia Klindienst, Jennifer Kabat, Alex Smith (Metropolarity) and M. Téllez (Metropolarity). To expand on these connections each reading draws out specific narrative threads over the course of this month-long reading series engagement.

Jennifer Kabat
Awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, Jennifer Kabat contributes frequently to Frieze and her essays have appeared in Granta, Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review and The White Review. She teaches at NYU and The New School, and her writing has been included in exhibitions at the Arnolfini (Bristol, England), Index (Stockholm, Sweden) and The Poor Farm (Little Wolf, WI), where her ongoing collaboration with artist Kate Newby was featured. She is working on a book of linked essays, GROWING UP MODERN, exploring civic values from the modernist suburb where she grew up to where she lives now in the Catskill Mountains.

The Seeds of Change Lunchtime Reading Series is organized in collaboration with Melanie Kress, Eric Rodriguez, Jasmin Chabla and Andi Pettis at The High Line. These readings draw on a community of elected affinities responding to the exhibition and look to the future it promises in the summer of 2018 when the plants will be re-sited in ballast flora gardens around New York, including the forthcoming installation at The High Line, as well as one at Pioneer Works and Weeksville Heritage Center.

Hyperallergic is the exclusive media sponsor for the International Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018.