Where We Are Now: 2016-2018 Biennial Prize Conference

Vera List Center 25th Anniversary Celebration
Where We Are Now: 2016-2018 Biennial Prize Conference

Maria Thereza Alves: A Botany of Colonization
Open daily 12:00–6:00pm 
Opening reception November 3, 6:30-8pm
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center 
Parsons The New School for Design 
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street
​New York

It's the 25th anniversary of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

On the brink of the elimination of federal arts funding in the U.S., widespread xenophobia, forced global migration, environmental destruction, and ongoing systemic racism, the Vera List Center is marking its milestone anniversary on November 3 & 4 with Where We Are Now, an international conference on art and social justice, featuring dynamic panel discussions, a stirring keynote address, an exhibition opening and other engaging events.

The conference will look at the urgent work of Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves who was awarded the 2016-2018 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics for her long-term project Seeds of Change. The conference will also include the five Prize Finalists: the London-based interdisciplinary research agency Forensic Architecture; the artists coalition Gulf Labor; House of Natural Fibers (HONF), a new media arts laboratory in Yogyakarta, Indonesia; IsumaTV, a collaborative multimedia platform for indigenous filmmakers and media organization in Canada; and MADEYOULOOK, an artist collective based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Each of these artists or collectives have been recognized for the impact, boldness and artistic excellence of their projects and the risks they take to advance social justice in profound and visionary ways. The two-day conference surveys the field of art and social justice by drawing on the exemplary practices of the finalists.

On November 3 from 6:30–8pm, the culminating exhibition Maria Thereza Alves: A Botany of Colonization will open to the public. The prize-winning artist, in association with students at The New School, has been mapping the artifacts and entities that trace the proliferation of foreign flora that travelled to New York and the surrounding region via trade ship ballast over the past two centuries. The installation includes a verdant collection of propagated ballast flora that will fill the Aronson Galleries in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons School for Design. A new series of watercolor drawings supplements this botanical collection and its cultivation, and shows the artist’s reflection on these historical ciphers through text and images. In addition, Alves has hand-drawn large-scale maps on canvas that further highlight those areas in historical New York harbor sites that have been filled in with ballast over the past few centuries.

Free admission to all events. Registration opens today.

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School was founded 25 years ago, driven by the rousing U.S. “culture wars,” freedom of speech and identity politics, and challenges to society’s investment in the arts. In a radically changed world, new debates on the same conflicts are now erupting with similar fervor throughout the world.

For further information, please visit www.veralistcenter.org or contact vlc@newschool.edu.