The Vera List Forum 2019 celebrates the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Recipient, Chimurenga, and the finalists of the prize, Jane Lombard Fellows: Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research; Liz Johnson Artur; Tiffany Chung; Naine Terena de Jesus; and Jasmeen Patheja.

Part one of this publication, “Chimurenga: Pan African Space Station at The New School,” features essays by Eriola Pira, Craig Harris, Corby Johnson, and Natasha Ginwala that showcase the work of Pan-African collective Chimurenga, which installed its three-day Pan African Space Station (PASS) at Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, The New School. The broadcast explores the participation of African American artists, activists, and intellectuals in the 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, FESTAC ’77, held in Lagos, Nigeria, in January-February 1977.

Part two focuses on the work of the Jane Lombard Fellows with essays by each of their nominators. Kaelen Wilson Goldie writes about Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir For Art and Research, a project founded by artists Emily Jacir, Annemarie Jacir, and Yusuf Nasri Jacir devoted to educational, cultural, and agricultural exchanges in Bethlehem. Antawan I. Byrd writes about Liz Johnson Artur‘s Black Balloon Archive, a career-spanning collection of thousands of photographs and video works that reflects the ubiquity and diversity of Black subjectivity in the contemporary era.

Bala Star writes about Tiffany Chung’s Vietnam Exodus Project, which examines the aftermath of one of the most significant global movements of refugees in the late twentieth century. Maria Thereza Alves writes about Naine Terena De Jesus‘s organization Oráculo, which provides community-driven workshops in art, education, and legal advocacy built on the logic of Indigenous thought. And Gauri Gill writes about Jasmeen Patheja‘s Blank Noise, a volunteer-based feminist collective that came together in Bangalore, India in response to unifying experiences of gender disparity across the culture.

“Their work shows us how art acquires political agency, how it shifts and affects the sites, practices, and participants of political processes in ways that traditional forms of political involvement may not, how it embraces values that transcend party politics, and how it implicates cultural institutions in this political order.”

—Carin Kuoni