October 20–22, 2022
The New School
66 West 12th Street, Room 604
New York, New York 10011
United States
vlc@newschool.edu
The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School is pleased to present the program for the 2022 Forum, the annual international convening of key participants in the field of art and politics. This year’s forum celebrates the Center’s 30th anniversary, and is organized within the framework of the VLC’s two-year investigation of Correction*. Three days of programming will provide myriad radical, joyous, and forward-looking entry points to new understandings of art, politics, and inclusive political empowerment.
To err is human; we know that. But to what degree is subsequent correction possible, or even desirable? The Forum explores these questions at a moment of deep societal fissures and climate change on a planetary scale, convening artists, thinkers, and activists from across the world for three days of conversations, presentations, and performances. This year’s event will feature a keynote lecture by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, a concert featuring Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, and an in-progress preview of Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts, and much more. Curator and jury member Wanda Nanibush will also announce the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice recipient and the four Jane Lombard Fellows, finalists for the prize.
Accompanying the program will be the exhibition Labor of Love: Vera List Center for Art and Politics at 30—representative of the VLC’s groundbreaking approach to creative scholarship and politics, it features archival documents on the Center’s 30-year journey into the intersection of art and politics. Also on view will be a three-part video installation, The Speeches Series, by Moroccan French artist and former VLC Fellow Bouchra Khalili. As common threads surface throughout the exhibition, VLC subjects its own history to a self-critical course correction and challenges both archival and curatorial practices.
The VLC’s work is animated by five central themes: democracy, knowledge, identity, ecology, and care. These themes are the organizing principles of the exhibition, and reflected in the dialogues that will play out over the course of this year’s Forum, but they are also windows into three decades of evolving understandings of the relationship between art and politics, and the role the VLC has played in deepening, examining, and articulating that intersection.
The VLC was founded in 1992—while debates raged over speech, identity, the role and responsibilities of art, and a rapidly transforming geopolitical landscape—as a place to further those dialogues, and lay the groundwork for action. The Center continues that work today, bringing together a diverse, global community of artists, scholars, and policymakers in the service of positive change. In the decades to come, the VLC will continue bringing together new generations of leaders across a spectrum of fields, from artists and academics to activists and legislators, cultivating new roles for the arts in the pursuit of justice.
Vera List Center Forum 2022: Correction*
Thursday, October 20
5–6:30pm
Opening reception: Labor of Love: Vera List Center for Art and Politics at 30
6:30–8pm
Make Room! with Lulani Arquette, Jane Hait, Shani Peters, Kathy Goncharov & more
Friday, October 21
2–6pm
Activations and performances highlighting the VLC’s history across The New School campus
6:30–7pm
Jane Lombard Prize Recipient and Jane Lombard Fellows Announcement
Saturday, October 22
4:30–6pm
A Time for Correction*, Introducing the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows: Matti Aikio, Carmen Amengual, Aleksei Borisionok, Beatriz Cortez, Fox Maxy, Omar Mismar, and Anna Martine Whitehead.
6–8pm
Viva Vera! Celebratory 30th Anniversary Dinner for All
8–9pm
Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty and FORCE! an opera in three acts
All events are in-person at The New School and livestreamed on veralistcenter.org.
The Vera List Center Forum 2022 and free admission to all events are made possible by major support from Jane Lombard and the Kettering Fund as well as The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, Dayton Foundation, Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Pryor Cashman LLP, The New School as well as members of the Vera List Center Board and other individuals.
For up-to-date event listings, video documentation, and resource guides to past seminars and programs, please visit veralistcenter.org or register for our newsletter here.
