Fall 2024 programs

As part of its Sabbatical Year, a slowing down and recalibration, this fall the Vera List Center for Art and Politics harvests from its two-year Focus Theme Correction*. The center presents two major projects by current VLC Fellows Anna Martine Whitehead and Carmen Amengual and dedicates this year’s annual VLC Forum to the political, social, and metaphorical implications of historical correction, repair, and restoration.

We’re pleased to share a preview of upcoming exhibitions, public programs, performances, publications, and more. For up-to-date event listings, video documentation, and programs, please visit www.veralistcenter.org or register for our Monday newsletter here.

Parsons Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Anna Martine Whitehead: Still in the Waiting Room
October 23, 2024, 7–8:30 pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall, University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue

Spanning installation, collage, socially-engaged performance, and opera, Whitehead’s work circles around questions of containment and liberation. How do bodies express livingness when penned in? What is the relationship between architecture and the voice? What does somatic solidarity with people in prison feel like? This performative talk explores the past decade of Whitehead’s practice, focusing especially on the Black femme waiting room.

VLC Forum 2024
Correct History*
October 24–26, 2024
The New School

The VLC Forum 2024: Correct History* explores the ways in which history and historiography invariably function as acts of correction and revision while examining some of the ideological mechanisms that drive them. Over three days, discursive strands come together to consider how historical narratives and ideological formations are created, edited, altered, and contested through historical revisionism, whitewashing, and rehabilitation by the state and other hegemonic, political actors.

Focusing on art, exhibition-making, historiography, and cultural practice writ large, the VLC Forum brings together scholars, artists, and curators whose reparative and recuperative artistic strategies point toward ways of redressing historical injustice, restitution of artifacts, and negotiating conflict and historical relatedness. Speakers include Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Naeem Mohaiemen, Kent Monkman, Larissa Nez, and Zoé Samudzi. With these and other speakers, the VLC Forum argues for poetic, artistic, and speculative forms of history-making that imagine new futures amid ongoing attempts at narrative control, denialism, censorship, and repression of peoples and their stories.

Performance
Anna Martine Whitehead: FORCE! an opera in three acts
November 22–23, 2024
Co-presented with Chocolate Factory
38-33 24th Street, Long Island City

In this opera by 2022–2024 VLC Fellow Anna Martine Whitehead, characters become fractals for the abundant relationships blooming in the shadows of the state and carceral power. This constellation imagines a strange sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls. Using the prison as a particular prism through which we can bear witness to the ways carceral systems replicate themselves, FORCE! is also an attempt to abolish the prison industrial complex in our heads, hearts, and houses.

AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture
Hilton Als
Wednesday, December 4, 2024, 6:30–8pm EST
The New School, Tishman Auditorium, University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue

Award-winning journalist, critic, and curator Hilton Als will deliver the 18th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture, presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. Als has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1994.

Exhibition
Carmen Amengual: A Non-Coincidental Mirror
December 7, 2024–February 9, 2025
Co-presented with Smack Mellon
92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, New York

A Non-Coincidental Mirror, a film installation by Los Angeles-based Argentine artist and 2022–2024 VLC Fellow Carmen Amengual, traces a little-known event in the cultural history of Global South solidarities: the First Third World Filmmakers Meeting in Algiers in 1973 and its second iteration in Buenos Aires a year later. Stemming from extensive research Amengual conducted using an archive she inherited from her mother, the project explores the networks of solidarity threaded throughout this story, and the historical forces that determined its outcome.

Book: As for Protocols
Co-published by the Vera List Center and Amherst College Press
March 2025, Available for pre-order

Protocols are systems of language that regulate how we relate to each other, to our cultural, social, and political environments, and to the technologies that create them. Looking at protocols across a wide range of disciplines, As for Protocols emerges from the 2020–22 VLC Focus Theme of the same name and  brings together twenty-two contributors who speak to protocols as practice—neither conventional mannerisms nor abstract concepts, but material processes, relational affinities, shared responsibilities, and mutual care.

With contributions by Salome Asega, Carolina Caycedo with Lupita Limón Corrales, Raven Chacon, Jesse Chun, Asia Dorsey, Taraneh Fazeli and Cannach MacBride, Pablo Helguera, Emmanuel Iduma, Mary Maggic, Shannon Mattern, V. Mitch McEwen with Nadir Jeevanjee, Rashaun Mitchell with Silas Riener, Romy Opperman, Rasheedah Phillips, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson with Maria Hupfield, Ultra-red with Robert Sember, and Underground Resistance.

Digital publishing series: Post/doc
Post/doc is a biannual publishing series by the Vera List Center for discursive, speculative, experimental writing and artistic practices. The series features interdisciplinary works by writers, artists, musicians, and poets that respond to the Center’s programmatic Focus Themes. The fall 2024 edition of Post/doc will be co-published with Momus, an international art publication, podcast, and mentorship platform. For previous editions, please visit our website.

*Image above: A stone object from the Piedras del Padre Nazario collection, filmed in the laboratory of Puerto Rican archaeologist Reniel Rodríguez, who has been studying their origins for years. The National Museum of Natural History has four of these stones in their collection, labeled as fakes.