A Conversation with Vera List Center for Art and Politics Director Carin Kuoni
For nearly three decades, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) has fostered a vibrant and diverse community of artists, scholars, and policymakers who take creative, intellectual, and political risks to bring about positive change. Founded at The New School in 1992, the VLC is a research center and a public forum that champions the arts as expressions of the political moments from which they emerge.
Earlier this year, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the VLC with a $500,000 grant. This grant will extend the center’s mission of public education and political empowerment, maximizing the impact of interdisciplinary programs that inform, galvanize, and sustain an ever-evolving network of artists, cultural leaders, scholars, curators, policymakers, institutional partners, students, faculty, and critics.
We sat down with the VLC’s Senior Director and Chief Curator Carin Kuoni to learn more about the grant and the ways it will be used to further the Vera List Center’s mission.
When did you find out the VLC had been awarded a grant from the Mellon Foundation, what were the emotions that followed?
Kuoni: How could it be otherwise these days?! — I learned of the fantastic news at home, in our bedroom, which has served as my office since last March.
Emotions? The deepest possible sigh of relief, shouts of joy, and immense pride in our VLC team and New School colleagues who make such reimagining possible. In a way it feels like times have caught up with us: what Vera G. List and my predecessor Sondra Farganis committed to almost thirty years ago was then a singular position at the height of the culture wars, to examine how art and society connect.
The VLC has since grown into a vibrant research center and public platform focusing on the intersection of art and politics through thematic broad-scale biennial investigations. We now have an exceptional team and support structure, and are a crucial destination in a rich and thriving network of local, national, and international collectives and centers that critically reflect on politically engaged art. In this area, the VLC is taking a leadership role in advocating for art as an avenue for political empowerment. So mixed in the joy at the fantastic news is a deep sense of responsibility: given the conditions of our planet, it is essential to expand our concepts of who and what has political agency. Art — in dynamic exchange with other practices — is enabling us to do so.
What will the Mellon Foundation grant go towards?
Kuoni: The grant will help us move towards becoming a prime research center for politically engaged art practices, an academic and practice-oriented center that is committed to public scholarship and artist support.
We’ve proposed a three-pronged approach to achieving this goal — scholarship and teaching on the intersection of art, politics, and ethics, artist support through our fellowships and commissioning program; and community engagement enacted through our publishing initiatives.
The concept of partnerships will be a driving force behind this growth, and is based on a comprehensive rethinking of organizational resources and assets. The financial support of the Mellon Foundation is crucial. But informed by our long standing engagement with representatives from marginalized communities, some of them Indigenous, we’re positioning among our core assets also attributes that are not of a financial nature — the collective knowledge and experience of our peers at The New School (the students, faculty, and staff); the VLC’s own history; our extraordinary team members; the architecture of the buildings we use; the physical grounds we literally “occupy” and their history and associations; our location in New York City, etc. We believe that adjusting our criteria for evaluation of an organization’s “assets” opens the possibility of new partnerships, alliances, or consortia where different qualities complement each other. We’re enormously excited to explore such partnerships further over the next three years, among others with Arizona State University’s Center for Imagination in the Borderlands (CIB).
How will this grant impact New School students?
Kuoni: We thrive on cross-generational, interdisciplinary practices, and are thrilled that with the grant we’ll be able to formalize the partnerships between our students and our artist fellows. We’re a certified member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), and have always paid students and interns, but an extended Graduate Student Fellowship will create opportunities for structural alignments between artists and student researchers, where the students are recognized as stakeholders and contributors to the resulting art work. Again, we are looking to test this approach with ASU’s CIB. We think such experiences are invaluable and for the students will significantly enhance career prospects and professional networks.
The grant will also allow us to build out our approach to teaching, learning, and knowledge production. We’ve already piloted with great success our free two-semester long interactive Seminars that are dedicated to the VLC’s biennial focus themes — Freedom of Speech, for instance most recently; the history and practice of Cultural Boycotts starting with South Africa and including BDS; or our current Seminar As for Protocols. Each is accompanied by a reader. With the grant, we are moving towards integrating these seminars into New School curricular offerings, making them available online, and in particular focusing on different forms of discourse practice and production. We’re excited to explore collaborative knowledge production, for instance between students, scholars, and the general public, and to look at notions of language and translation. The concept of accessibility is key, and includes ideas on “plain” language that we are excited to explore. The New School’s non-traditional learners and its international student body are precisely the student body we’re seeking to support and grow with such courses.
Can you share a little bit about the importance of the work the VLC conducts, especially during this time of turmoil in American politics + the global COVID-19 crisis?
Kuoni: When everything was shut down — campus, museums, artist spaces, cafes — and the city was vacated, we threw open our virtual doors of online events, and provided an expansive, safe platform of regular programming, a widely shared resource kit, and community gathering. We doubled our honoraria — are still doing so — invested in accessibility (close caption and ASL), and are revamping our website to meet new online accessibility standards. We did the opposite of withdrawal, and have been humbled by the interactions, networks, gestures of solidarity unleashed by our platform connecting people literally from different corners of the world.
I don’t see us stopping there now. These new forums underpin what artists, Indigenous communities, philosophers, and students have said for a while — time and distance are categories that are less relevant in contemporary conditions than they used to be. New approaches are emerging regarding proximity, kinship, intimacy, care, solidarity, born of precarity and coasting on technological advances, and it’s rewarding and urgently necessary to have programs in place — and now be able to build them out — that speak to this new paradigm: our transdisciplinary, long-term, open access Seminars, the artist fellowships, the multi-platform publishing initiatives, institutional partnerships, and the residencies of Jane Lombard Fellows which together allow us to connect across geographical and temporal zone.
At this moment of increasing polarity in the U.S. and rising authoritarian regimes, solidarity across nation borders and international communication are essential to help address vast income disparity, global warming, systemic racism, violent resource extraction, and the pandemic. We posit that art and artists, in collaboration with scholars, students and the public, are offering alternative ways of collectively sharing and shaping communities — of being political in different parts of the world, at different scales, a hemisphere apart, yet closely aligned.
What do you feel is an artist’s role when it comes to politics and/or being politically engaged?
Kuoni: Artists open up the political imaginary, and invite us to think of and enact exemplary social situations, pilot different social conditions, reflect on foundations of social life.
They can model pathways to more equitable participation, shift frames of reference and paradigms, and prompt us to consider the most mundane and familiar.
If we think of politics as collective decision-making about the shared public and societal space (as in direct or representative democracies), politically engaged artists can help expand our understanding of representation and power, and what that might mean, for people, non-human beings, the inanimate, planetary climate conditions. Art is an aesthetic practice that entails a level of abstraction that transcends the specifics. Politics is not that different, continuously designing structures of authority and power that also extend beyond the exigencies of the day.
These parallels are one reason we’re so excited about our current programming on protocols.
How will this Mellon Foundation grant help you continue supporting artists in this mission?
Kuoni: We’ll be able to move from fellowships that support open-ended research to commissions of art projects that integrate the artists in a rich network of intellectual resources — at TNS — institutional partnerships where the projects will be shown.
This also constitutes an embrace of the material aspects of art making, and I’m excited to engage more deeply with The New School Art Collection as a pedagogical tool and material archive. Already, some of our fellows’ works have entered the collection and I hope we can expand this type of symbiotic alignment, centering the intersection of art, politics, and social justice at The New School and complementing the artists’ work in this area with our expanded scholarship and research activities.
The Vera List Center has numerous free virtual events and forums coming up this spring focusing on its biennial theme “As for Protocols.” See the list below for more information on these events.
Climate Relations: Indigeneity in Activism, Art and Digital Media
Thursday, February 11, 2021, 3–4:30PM (EST)
This panel brings together native scholars and artists, each working at the intersection of activism, art, and digital media, who reflect on various strands of Indigenous climate relations that work towards improving the quality of our lives. Artist and VLC Borderlands Fellow Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabek, Wasauksing First Nation) and theorist Jennifer Wemigwans (Anishinaabek, Wikwemikong Unceded Territory) together with two-spirit curator, activist, and historian Regan De Loggans (Mississippi Choctaw/Ki’Che Maya) discuss recent projects spanning Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.
Communication After Refusal: The Turn to Love and Polyvocality
Monday, February 22, 2021, 7–9:00PM (EST)
On the occasion of the publication of Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture, a book of essays on the ways Black digital media artists have pursued liberation since the 1960s, this panel, consisting of 2020–2022 VLC Fellow Rasheedah Phillips, with Deanna Bowen and author Anaïs Duplan, considers how cultural protocols for decoding Black avant-garde creative production have failed.
Protocols of Revolutionary Feminisms to Re/make the World
Monday, March 8, 2021, 6–8:00PM (EST)
For International Women’s Day, our fifth VLC Seminar on Protocols, convened with Ujju Aggarwal and Laura Y. Liu, explores the theme of revolutionary feminisms, and the multi-scalar and trans-historical practices they embody, especially in the context of social reproduction, gendered labor, care and kinship, solidarity, and internationalism.
Lab Work: Art of the Experiment
Monday, April 5, 2021, 5–7:00PM (EST)
This sixth VLC Seminar on Protocols seeks to use and remake “the scientific experiment” in consideration of critical histories and theories of technoscience and with acknowledgement of “the experiment” as always also a site of Empire, but whose uses are sometimes democratized, queered, and decolonized by various practices. Convened with Jeannine Tang, with artists fields harrington, Mary Maggic, and Claire Pentecost.
Kite: Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road). A Dialogue About Making Art in a Good Way
Friday, May 21, 2021, 4–5:30PM (EST)
Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite hosts a conversation with artistic and research collaborators on her year-long VLC project Hél čhaŋkú kiŋ ȟpáye (There lies the road) focused on how Lakȟóta ontology can inform art and world-making in a “Good Way.” This project is an art commission and continues in November 2021.
