2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellowships

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School is pleased to invite applications for the 2020–2022 Vera List Center Research Fellowships. Three non-residential, two-year fellowships will be awarded to support scholarly and creative projects that correspond to the Vera List Center’s 2020-2022 biennial focus theme As for Protocols. 

Vera List Center Research Fellowships
The Vera List Center Fellowships support individuals whose work advances the discourse on art and politics. The appointments provide the opportunity to research and develop a project drawing from the curatorial, academic, and professional resources of the Vera List Center and The New School, and to bring it to the public through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary public programs and organizational networks.

The Vera List Center is a public forum and university-based research center that focuses exclusively on advancing public scholarship on contemporary issues at the intersection of art and politics. Through their projects, the Vera List Center Fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the Center and benefit from the support of New School faculty and students. For the 2020–2022 cycle, in our multi-disciplinary curatorial programs, we are mining “protocols,” both their expressive as well as their constricting potential. We’re interested in projects that creatively and rigorously approach the biennial theme, in content and form, and advance our understanding of how protocols enact and materialize in language, networks, and power.

The Vera List Center will appoint a total of three fellows for the 2020-2022 cycle, including the inaugural Boris Lurie Fellow, the first named artist fellowship. Named after Russia-born artist Boris Lurie (1924-2008) and in acknowledgment of The New School’s historic University in Exile, the Boris Lurie Research Fellowship is reserved for an artist living outside the U.S. with special consideration given to those who have faced political hardship.

Fellowship Benefits
The Vera List Center Fellowship is part-time, non-residential, and extends over two years. In addition to USD 15,000, the research fellowship includes extensive curatorial and professional development services to support the project from conception to production and presentation. Each fellowship is highly individualized, depending on the project and its intended outcomes. Fellows are supported for two years by the VLC’s curatorial and operational team as well as a graduate student research assistant. They have access to a wide range of activities throughout The New School and enjoy extensive library privileges. Meetings and informal gatherings with New School faculty, past Fellows and other constituencies are organized regularly and offer opportunities for professional development as well as social exchanges. It is not necessary to spend two years in New York; non-New York City residents are provided with travel allowance to undertake short-term residencies in NY, to engage with the VLC’s curatorial team and taking full advantage of the program’s benefits.

As for Protocols: 2020–2022 Vera List Center Biennial Focus Theme
Explicitly—or not—protocols determine much of what we do. Far exceeding traditional notions of “good manners,” protocols are languages that regulate how people relate to each other, to their cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. They are indices of governmental, organizational, social, or corporate power structures. Protocols speak to processes, rather than finite outcomes. While often overlooked or invisible, they set the conditions for potential encounters. Investigating them as such will allow us to consider and help develop new protocols that counter current hegemonies and are, instead, inclusive and equitable, ranging from computer interfaces, A.I., data aggregation, and algorithms to community agreements and culturally-specific engagement protocols to protocols undergirding scientific research. As “protocol” may also refer to documentation and minutes, the term signals a hybrid time frame of both the past and projection into the future. With the engagement of the Vera List Center Fellows as well as other artists, scholars, activists, and students, we will approach protocols as the foundations for the performance of living, and begin thinking and working toward new spaces of political empowerment.

Application Deadline: March 15, 2020

For full fellowship eligibility, considerations, expectations, and timeline please visit our website. Apply here.