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, with the exhibition Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural?, presented at The New School from October 9 to 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 assembles the finalists for the prize, who are appointed Jane Lombard Fellows: Nepalese artist collective ArTree Nepal; New York-based artist Stephanie Dinkins; Hawaiian and Samoan digital media theorist and poet Jason Edward Lewis from Canada; and Finnish artist Jenna Sutela.

This publication serves as both an exhibition catalogue and program guide. The first section focuses on Paulino’s ¿História Natural?, opening with selected reproductions from the original artist book. Diane Lima, who nominated Paulino for the prize, reflects on the development of the book, and Lorraine Leu places Paulino’s practice into a broader context of Black women’s survival and geohistories. A conversation between the artist and exhibition curators Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira centers on the refusal to reproduce the violence of colonial images. Re’al Christian writes a prelude for the exhibition’s four-part Black Feminist Study Group, a program rooted in practices of collective listening and call and response.

The second section highlights the work of the Jane Lombard Fellows, bringing together statements and provocations on notions of intelligence by the artists along with essays on their nominated projects. Neta Bomani meditates on Stephanie Dinkins’s Conversations with Bina48, an ongoing exchange with the social robot Bina48 that reflects on Afro-now-ism and more-than-human knowledge. Mashinka Hakopian writes about Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led research program co-founded by Jason Edward Lewis that foregrounds anticolonial approaches to technology. Suzanne Livingston examines Jenna Sutela’s nimiia cétiï, a work that brings together biological organisms and neural networks to imagine new forms of language and relation. And Vivian Ziherl explores ArTree Nepal’s Tikā Chedna Angana, a project that highlights intergenerational embodied knowledge within Indigenous tattooing practices along the Nepali borderlands.

Rounding out the publication is a detailed guide to the forum, which features conversations, the VLC Community Dinner 2026: Dream Futures, and a keynote lecture by prize jury chair Chus Martínez, where she 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?”