66 West 12th Street, Room 604
New York New York 10011
United States
The Vera List Center for Art and Politics announces its spring 2026 program, continuing the 2025–2027 VLC Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. This spring, we deepen our inquiry into intelligence as both knowledge and infrastructure—considering how information is produced, circulated, measured, and contested across artistic, academic, and political contexts. Upcoming programs, exhibitions, fellow presentations, publications, and screenings examine intelligence not only through formal systems of media, metrics, and institutions, but also through informal, relational, and material practices that shape how we come to know.
For up-to-date listings, please visit veralistcenter.org, sign up for our newsletter, or follow us on Instagram.
Robert Rauschenberg & the News: Select Prints from The New School Art Collection
Opening reception and panel: Thursday, February 19, 5:30–8pm
Exhibition on view through January 2027
Wollman Hall, The New School
This exhibition brings together, for the first time, 15 prints by Robert Rauschenberg held in the university’s collection. Created between the 1960s and 1990s, the works register urgent responses to social and political unrest. Opening the installation, an Inaugural Panel brings together curators Juliana Ochs Dweck and Helen Hsu and New School faculty and poet Margaret Rhee to examine Rauschenberg’s work in relation to journalism, activism, and politics.
Co-organized by The New School Art Collection and the VLC and presented with the support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on occasion of the artist’s Centennial.
New School New Books 2026
Friday, February 20, 11am–5pm
Wollman Hall, The New School
Our fourth annual reading series reflects on contemporary modes of writing and on-campus publishing platforms, focusing on "intelligence" as knowledge production and the apparatuses that produce it. Featuring newspapers, magazines, digital publications, and journals run by faculty, students, and staff from across the university: Africa is a Country; Public Seminar; The New Context; ULTRA-RED: A Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry; A Decolonized and Decarbonized Dinner Party; 11 and a Half Journal; 12th Street Journal; Food and Social Justice Action Research Lab; the VLC’s Post/doc; and many more.
IQ Regimes: Race, Metrics, and Mobility
Wednesday, March 4, 8–9:30pm EST
Online
2025–2027 VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa and historian Quinn Slobodian explore shared concerns around IQ, race, and migration. Together, they trace the throughlines between early eugenic cognitive tests and today’s algorithmic decision-making systems that weaponize “intelligence” to regulate mobility and enforce racial and ethnic boundaries. Presented in collaboration with Composite and the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne.
Matter of Intelligence Seminar 4
After the Native Informant
Monday, March 23, 6:30–8pm EDT
Starr Foundation Hall, The New School
Unpacking the long history of the “native informant,” a figure that once anchored ethnographic and colonial authority and continues to shape who is recognized as a knower across artistic, cultural, and academic contexts, this seminar considers the informant as a strategic role in sharing intelligence that refuses essentialization and resists collapsing knowledge into information or data extraction. In conversation with Eriola Pira, curator KJ Abudu and artists Jackson Polys and Selma Selman examine the figure of the native informant within contemporary art’s renewed desires for Indigeneity and otherness, playing with the demand for authenticity or knowledge with irony, opacity, or even misdirection.
Testing, testing
Thursday, April 9, 7–9pm EDT
e-flux Screening Room
172 Classon Ave, Brooklyn
Presented in collaboration with e-flux Screening Room, Testing, testing examines intelligence testing, its histories, ongoing effects, and entanglement with artificial intelligence. Across the program, featuring films by Coleman Collins, Sandra Erbacher, and Ruth Estévez, intelligence emerges as a performative system—one that measures minds, choreographs bodies, and dictates their position in space and in relation to one another. Co-curated with Abirami Logendran.
Matter of Intelligence Seminar 5
Gossip Work
Monday, April 27, 2–3:30pm EDT
Online
Gossip, like intelligence, is everywhere and nowhere. It circulates along social networks and institutional corridors, at once unverifiable and consequential. Often dismissed, gossip has been a vital mode of producing and circulating intelligence outside official channels or sharing what cannot be spoken aloud. With philosopher Karen C. Adkins, graphic designer Deborah Khodanovich, and artist and curator Lua Vollaard, we ask how gossip, rumor, and illicit knowledge operate as an intelligence system, through informal infrastructures, embodied knowledge, and fugitive social forms.
Matter of Intelligence Seminar 6
Scholars and Spies
Monday, May 11, 6:30–8pm EDT
Online
Scholars and Spies examines the intertwined histories of scholarship, research, and academia with the infrastructures and functions of intelligence services and espionage, statecraft, and empire. We explore how knowledge—its production, circulation, and authority—has been implicated in and mobilized by covert and overt forms of power. Participants to be announced.
Post/doc
The Spring 2026 edition of Post/doc—the VLC’s biannual digital publishing series—features New Orleans-based tonal geologist and researcher Ryan C. Clarke and Tulsa-based multidisciplinary artist Le’Andra LeSeur, who grapple with sound as matter and material for understanding interpersonal, relational intelligence during times of political upheaval and dislocation.
Matter of Intelligence Are.na
A research and publishing channel of the VLC’s two-year Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence, the Are.na collects and shares the curatorial ideas, questions, and research framework guiding the Center’s inquiry and the programs and initiatives developing throughout this period.
