Fall 2025 VLC programs: Matter of Intelligence

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics announces its fall 2025 line up of programming, launching its 2025–27 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. This transdisciplinary inquiry delves into the nature of intelligence—its emergence, its embodiment, its histories, and its futures.

Through programs, fellowship projects, publications, and exhibitions, Matter of Intelligence approaches intelligence not just as an abstract concept but as something that manifests—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. We’re pleased to share a preview of upcoming programs under this Focus Theme, including the annual VLC Forum, along with additional events.

For up-to-date listings, please visit veralistcenter.org or register for our Monday newsletter.

Matter of Intelligence Seminar I
Paying Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of the Intellectual
Monday, September 29, 2025, 6:30–8pm EDT
Starr Foundation Hall, The New School, 63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level

Through shared study and iterative dialogue with invited artists, thinkers, and the public, the VLC Seminar Series develops and presents artistic and scholarly research centered on the Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. Seminar 1 convenes cross-disciplinary New School faculty—Omri Boehm, Simon Critchley, Camonghne Felix, Sean Jacobs, Natasha Lennard, Ethan Philbrick, and Cresa Pugh—to reflect on the notion of the public intellectual—its histories and internal contradictions, the shifting roles it has played in public life, and the possibilities it may still hold. Hosted and moderated by the VLC’s Carin Kuoni.

As for Protocols x Convivialities
Friday, October 3, 2025
6:30–8pm EDT
Critical Distance Centre for Curators
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 122
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Critical Distance hosts the joint Toronto launch of the VLC’s latest anthology As for Protocols (Vera List Center/Amherst College Press 2025) and Montréal-based writer and editor Michael Nardone’s Convivialities (Talonbooks 2025). Nardone is joined by the VLC’s Re’al Christian, co-editor of As for Protocols, for a conversation on the editorial/curatorial practices and perspectives at the core of their two volumes, which each ermerged through sustained engagement with writers and artists articulating contemporary conditions of making.

VLC Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence
Friday and Saturday, October 17 and 18
The New School and online

The Vera List Center Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence brings together interdisciplinary cultural thinkers around the subject of intelligence, exploring both its material and intangible implications.

Anchored by the newly announced VLC Fellows—Moriah Evans, Mashinka Hakopian, Joyce Joumaa, and Kira Xonorika—this year’s VLC Forum offers a first public glimpse into their unfolding fellowship projects. Each artist is joined by a special guest of their choice in dialogue or parallel inquiry.

Philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli delivers the keynote lecture, with a response by media scholar David Bering-Porter. The annual VLC Community Dinner explores the mind-gut axis through food, setting the stage for bold ideas, unexpected connections, and powerful new insights into the intelligence Focus Theme unfolding over the next two years. Other participants include Meredith Broussard, Catherine D'Ignazio, Sandra Erbacher and Ruth Estévez, Lamin Fofana, André Lepecki, Tania Khouri, Tiara Roxanne, and Jia Sung. Find the full program on our website. 

Matter of Intelligence Seminar II
Of Matter
Monday, November 10, 2025, 7–8:30pm EST
Online

How does matter think, and what does it mean to think with matter? Matter of Intelligence Seminar 2 invites inquiry into the nature of matter, exploring matter—and by extension, intelligence—not simply as substance but as process, dynamic, relational, and always in formation. With Laura Tripaldi, a transdisciplinary researcher at the interface of science, technology, and speculative thinking, and Harpreet Sareen, designer, researcher, and artist. Hosted and moderated by the VLC’s Eriola Pira. 

AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture
Kellie Jones: BODY / KNOWLEDGE
Monday, December 1, 2025, 6:30–8pm EST
The New School (exact location to be announced)
In-person and online

Art historian and curator Kellie Jones delivers the 19th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, co-presented by the Vera List Center. In this lecture, Jones reflects on the theoretical legacy and cultural production of Black women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, raising questions of intellectual lineage and material knowledge. 

Matter of Intelligence Seminar III
Cosmic Intelligence
Saturday, December 6, 2025, 2–4pm EST
Performance Space New York
150 1st Ave 4th floor, New York, NY 10009

What does it mean to speak of intelligence at the scale of the planet—the cosmos? Cosmic Intelligence, co-presented as part of the VLC’s Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series with Performance Space New York as part of its We The Youth: Keith Haring Lecture for Kids, explores the possibility that intelligence is not only of the mind, but emerges through planetary, cosmic, relational, and distributed systems—woven into the very dynamics that shape existence across scale. Participants and other details to be announced.

Post/doc 
Post/doc is the Vera List Center’s biannual digital publishing series for discursive, speculative, and experimental writing and artistic practices that respond to the Center’s programmatic Focus Themes. The fall 2025 edition of Post/doc includes Georgian artist Levan Mindiashvili (Levani), whose project mediates on embodied consciousness within collective resistance movements. Additional Post/doc contributors to be announced later this fall. 

Matter of Intelligence Are.na
The Matter of Intelligence Are.na is a research and publishing channel related to the Vera List Center’s two-year Focus Theme. It collects and shares the curatorial ideas, questions, and research framework guiding the VLC’s inquiry and the programs and initiatives developing throughout this period. 

All Vera List Center programs are free to attend, physically and virtually. If you have specific access questions or needs please contact us at least seven days prior to the program at vlc@newschool.edu.

The Fall 2025 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, other individual donors, and the following institutional donors: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, the Kettering Fund, Mellon Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. The 2025 VLC Forum is supported by the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy and the Helen Shapiro Lectureship fund.