2022–24 VLC Fellows

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at The New School is pleased to announce the appointment of five fellows under its 2022–24 Focus Theme Correction*: Carmen Amengual (Los Angeles); Anna Martine Whitehead (Chicago); Boris Lurie Fellow Omar Mismar (Beirut, Lebanon); and Borderlands Fellows Beatriz Cortez (Los Angeles) and Fox Maxy (San Diego).

Each of the fellowship projects—in form and content—explores the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction.” Each fellow receives a 15,000 USD award in addition to research, production, and presentation support through the Vera List Center’s interdisciplinary programs and organizational networks. With their projects, which range from feature films to an opera, the fellows contribute to the intellectual foundation of the VLC, now in its 30th year, and to the public’s understanding and engagement with creative practices and pressing issues through the lens of correction.

Fellowship program
The Vera List Center Fellowships support individuals whose work advances the discourse on art and politics. Launched in 1993, a year after the VLC’s founding, the fellowship has placed artists at the heart of the center’s activities. Beginning with its 2020–22 fellowship cycle, the VLC introduced the Borderlands Fellowship, jointly directed with the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, and the Boris Lurie Fellowship, made possible with support from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation.

“This new cohort of groundbreaking artists and activists joins us at a transformational time in the center’s history—our 30th anniversary—inspiring us to course correct, follow them into new and diverse fields and geographies, and affirm the power of art in imagining and enacting radical and joyous futures,” said Carin Kuoni, Senior Director and Chief Curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. “In doing so, they chart our course for the next two years and well beyond it.”

Meet the VLC Fellows!
Carmen Amengual, Los Angeles, 2022–24 VLC Fellow
Carmen Amengual is an interdisciplinary artist from Argentina, whose work examines the interstices between memory, biography, and history. A Non-coincidental Mirror fabricates a memory for a forgotten event: the Third World Filmmakers Meeting (Algiers, 1973–Buenos Aires, 1974), while exploring a failed documentary project, which the organizers intended as a tool to educate a Latin American audience about anti-colonial struggles in Africa.

Beatriz Cortez, Los Angeles, 2022–24 Borderlands Fellow
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores simultaneity, different temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. Cortez’s VLC Fellowship project considers the Tierra Blanca Joven, the layer of ash deposited by the fifth century C.E. eruption of the Ilopango volcano, as sacred land with spiritual meaning to people who have migrated and continue to migrate from the Central American region to other territories. 

Fox Maxy, San Diego, 2022–24 Borderlands Fellow
Fox Maxy is a film director and artist from San Diego. Watertight, her first feature film, is an artwork about mental health and suicide, about what harms and heals. A hybrid documentary, it intertwines casual group interviews with narrative scenes serving as surreal commercial breaks.

Omar Mismar, Beirut, 2022–24 Boris Lurie Fellow
Omar Mismar is a Lebanese visual artist whose project-based practice is materially loose and conceptually driven. Revolution is a Frown Gone Mad investigates the rampant culture of Botox in Lebanon as an extension of war and the witnessing of perpetual violence. The project raises fundamental questions about the aesthetics of disaster, reframed as a discourse on the sensuous body and the anesthetization of the body politic.

Anna Martine Whitehead, Chicago, 2022–24 VLC Fellow
Anna Martine Whitehead is a Virginia-raised Chicago-based performer, artist, and writer interested in Black queer temporalities. FORCE! an opera in three acts, is a world-building and Black femme story of interior lives and shared dreams that examines relationships and sisterhood that bloom in the shadow of prisons and the prison industrial complex.

For more information about each fellow, visit veralistcenter.org.