Correction* fall programs

This fall marks the first semester of the Vera List Center’s two-year Focus Theme, Correction*, which explores the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction,” coinciding with the celebration of the Center’s 30th anniversary.

Correction* seminar series
Bridging theory and practice, each online seminar in the two-year series Correction* unfolds through three distinct research clusters every semester set to guide our joint investigation into Institutional Critique, the Body, and Carcerality. We launch the Correction* series with Seminar 1—Ashes to Artifact: Cultural Death, Repair, and Restitution of the Benin Bronzes on Monday, September 26 at 6 pm EDT. For this seminar, Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School, explores the return of the Benin Bronzes and what it means to attempt to overcome more than a century of imperial violence against this collection of artifacts and their descendants. Pugh’s lecture is punctuated by poetry readings by Nigerian poet Inua Ellams.

VLC Forum 2022: Correction*
The Vera List Center Forum is an international, annual convening of key participants in the field of art and politics. This year’s Forum is organized within the framework of the VLC’s two-year Focus Theme, Correction*. Taking place in person and online from Thursday, October 20 through Saturday, October 22, 2022, the Forum presents the 2022–2024 Vera List Center Fellows, announces the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize Recipient and Fellows (finalists for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice), and celebrates the Center’s history of art and politics.

The Forum launches on Thursday, October 20 with the opening of Labor of Love: Vera List Center for Art and Politics at 30. Reflecting on the Center’s history, this exhibition, which also features a video installation by 2011–2013 VLC Fellow Bouchra Khalili, touches on five themes that continue to shape the VLC’s work—democracy, knowledge, identity, ecology, and care. We conclude Day One with a panel conversation on new artistic environments, with speakers including Jane Hait, founder, Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA) and Shani Peters, co-founder, The Black School.

Day Two includes performative reenactments of key moments from the VLC’s history, followed by the announcement of the 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Prize Recipient and Jane Lombard Fellows, presented by artist Simone Leigh, and a keynote lecture on 30 years of art and politics by Raqs Media Collective co-founder, artist, and curator, Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

Day Three includes presentations by the five recently announced 2022–2024 Fellows: VLC Fellows Carmen Amengual (Los Angeles) and Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago); Borderlands Fellows Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles) and Fox Maxy (San Diego); and Boris Lurie Fellow Omar Mismar (Beirut). We close out the Forum with a celebratory dinner for all, Viva Vera!, and a concert featuring performances by Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty, and an in-progress preview of Anna Martine Whitehead’s FORCE! an opera in three acts.

Lecture
AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture
Monday, December 12, 2022, 6:30–8pm EST
In-person at The New School and Online
The VLC presents the 16th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture. Previous lecturers in this series have included Legacy Russell, Courtney J. Martin, Aruna D’Souza, Naomi Beckwith, Lucy Lippard, Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, and Linda Nochlin.

Screening
Adelita Husni Bey film premiere
Thursday, December 15, 2022, 7–8:30pm EST
The New School
2020–2022 VLC Fellow Adelita Husni Bey premieres her VLC Fellowship commissioned film These Conditions (working title), which looks into the current pandemic and its aftermath from a larger, historical and artistic framework.

Vera List Center publishing
VLC publications respond to and nurture a thriving field of politically engaged art practices throughout the world. Beginning this fall, the Center will present online projects that bring together writers and artists responding to the theme of Correction*. Other forthcoming publications by the Vera List Center include 2016–2018 Jane Lombard Prize Recipient Maria Thereza Alves’s monograph Seeds of Change (Spring 2023), the second title in a newly launched publishing partnership with Amherst College Press—following Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech—and an artist book by 2020–2022 Borderlands Fellow Maria Hupfield on Indigneous performance protocols (Spring 2023).

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.