This publication accompanies the Vera List Center Forum 2026, an annual international convening of key participants in the field of art and politics, held at The New School on October 9 & 10. The VLC Forum 2026 is organized within the framework of the center’s two-year focus theme, Matter of Intelligence, a multiplatform research program exploring the origins and implications of intelligence across species, systems, and societies through art and critical inquiry.

Over two days, the program convenes and celebrates artists, curators, writers, scholars, and technologists, inviting communities to explore the many forms intelligence can take. The VLC Forum 2026 honors Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, recipient of the Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. An exhibition of Paulino’s work, ¿História Natural?, is presented at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons School of Design, from October 9 through November 1, 2026. Anchored by her landmark artist book of the same name, the exhibition traces Paulino’s critical examinations of the entanglements between science, race, knowledge, and power.

Alongside Paulino, the forum programming assembles the finalists for the prize, who are appointed Jane Lombard Fellows: They are the Nepalese artist collective ArTree Nepal for Tikā Chedna Angana; New York-based artist Stephanie Dinkins for Conversations with Bina48; Hawaiian and Samoan digital media theorist and poet Jason Edward Lewis from Canada for Abundant Intelligences; and Finnish artist Jenna Sutela for nimiia cétiï. In conversation with their nominators or invited guests at the forum, the fellows share their nominated projects and their engagement with the material and intangible dimensions of intelligence.

This publication serves as both a program guide and exhibition catalogue, with reproductions from ¿História Natural? featured alongside writing on Paulino’s project by Diane Lima and Lorraine Leu, a conversation between the artist and exhibition curators Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira, and a text on the exhibition’s Black Feminist Study Group by Re’al Christian. The second section highlights the work of the Jane Lombard Fellows brings together statements on notions of intelligence by the artists along with essays on their nominated projects by Neta Bomani, Mashinka Hakopian, Suzanne Livingston, and Vivian Ziherl.

A detailed guide to the forum rounds out the publication, featuring conversations, the 2026 VLC Community Dinner: Dream Futures, and a keynote lecture by prize jury chair Chus Martínez, which examines intelligence as plastic and relational to pose the questions: “What should we do with intelligence? What forms of intelligence are still producing the social?”