2020–2022 VLC Fellows: “As for Protocols”

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School proudly announces the appointment of five fellows for the upcoming 2020–2022 program cycle, including Boris Lurie Fellow Etcétera and Borderlands Fellows Carolina Caycedo and Maria Hupfield, in addition to Adelita Husni-Bey and Rasheedah Phillips. The Boris Lurie Fellowship and Borderlands Fellowships are being awarded for the first time. With the addition of these two new initiatives, this cycle represents a significant expansion of the VLC’s fellowship program and its expanded support to artists. 

The fellows are appointed under the VLC’s 2020–2022 thematic focus “As for Protocols,” investigating both the urgency of the global pandemic and the protocols of power and control that are exerted over people, places, and the environment.

The Boris Lurie Fellow, established with a grant from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, is awarded to an artist living outside the U.S. with special consideration to those who have faced political hardship. The Borderlands Fellowship, a collaboration between the VLC and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, pairs the distinct institutional resources of the two centers in order to support research projects that create communities across different geographical, cultural, and political landscapes.

Since its inception in 1993, the fellowship program has supported 33 distinguished artists and scholars including Maurice Berger, Jill Magid, Lorraine O’Grady, Walid Raad, and most recently Dean Erdmann and Helene Kazan. Each fellow receives a USD 15,000 research grant and substantial curatorial, research, and production support over the two-year period and will present at public events, with access to The New School community.  

2020–22 VLC Fellowship Projects and Artists
Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and pedagogue invested in anarcho-collectivism, theater, and critical legal studies. Drawing upon historical and contemporary protocols, policy responses, and decrees in response to viral pandemics, Husni-Bey’s temporary “School of Pandemics” will unfold as a series of theater workshops and subsequent short films that propose the virality of mutual aid and international solidarity networks as transformative social forces that emerge and are instituted under quarantine.

Rasheedah Phillips is a queer Philadelphia-based public interest attorney, mother, interdisciplinary artist, and Black Futurist cultural producer. “Time Zone Protocols” explores rules underlying Westernized concepts of time, standardized at the 1884 International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., and their role in the systemic, temporal oppression of Black and other marginalized communities. Resulting in inter-media work and the Prime Meridian Unconference, the project rewrites the protocols of time with a Black temporal lens.

Boris Lurie Fellowship
Etcétera is an Argentinian multidisciplinary collective composed of visual artists, poets, and performers. As a counter position to multinational agreements and treaties for the protection of the environment that often fail or disappoint, Etcétera will develop “NEO-EXTRA-ACTIVISM,” a two-year platform for collecting and creating new and existing protocols protecting the environment that are based on or inspired by those of farmers and Indigenous peoples, socio-environmental organizations and activists, art and ecology groups, and, more recently, mutual aids, and incorporate the Indigenous concept of Buen Vivir. 

Borderlands Fellowship
Carolina Caycedo is a London-born Colombian multidisciplinary artist known for her performances, video, artist’s books, sculptures, and installations that examine environmental and social issues. “The Collapsing of a Model” advances the artist’s work on the construction of “borders” as an extractive infrastructure serving multiple corporate and state interests, from homeland security to the oil industry. Her examination within the framework of fair energy transition focuses on local, popular, and self-sustaining energy production alternatives that challenge the current mining-energy model.

Maria Hupfield is a transdisciplinary artist working in performance and media arts. “Breaking Protocol” will embody anthropologist Audra Simpson’s theory on the politics of refusal and Indigenous feminist scholarship on ethical collaboration. Using performance art and museum display strategies this project will visualize Native women, non-binary, and transgender people as the decolonial heart of art-making in North America.