CONVERSATION HOW SOON IS NOW: , ACTIVISM AND ACCOUNTABILITY

THURSDAY, MAY 30, 2019 6:30-8:30 PM Vera List Center for Art and Politics The New School The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street New York City ARTFORUM

Since 1962, Artforum has delivered ground breaking criticism on the latest developments in , exploring trends, making discoveries, and writing the history of the art of our times. As the magazine of record, Artforum’s role remains constant—giving visibility to emerging artists and delivering a fresh perspective on the established cannon, all while examining and questioning the social realities and political landscape that give rise to our visual culture globally. www.artforum.com

VERA LIST CENTER FOR ART AND POLITICS

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is a research center and a public forum for art, culture, and politics. It was established at The New School in 1992—a time of rousing debates about freedom of speech, identity politics, and society’s investment in the . A pioneer in the field, the center is a nonprofit that serves a critical mission: to foster a vibrant and diverse community of artists, scholars, and policy makers who take creative, intellectual, and political risks to bring about positive change.

We champion as expressions of the political moments from which they emerge, and consider the intersection between art and politics the space where new forms of civic engagement must be developed. We are the only university-based institution committed exclusively to leading public research on this intersection. Through public programs and classes, prizes and fellowships, publications and exhibitions that probe some of the pressing issues of our time, we curate and support new roles for the arts and artists in advancing social justice. www.veralistcenter.org

Cover image: P.A.I.N. protesters in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, March 10, 2018. Photo: Thomas Pavia PROGRAM The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School andArtforum present How Soon Is Now: Art, Activism and Accountability in response to the growing protests museums are facing and inspired by Artforum’s May issue on art and activism. It brings together artists, activists, critics and institutional leaders to confront arts’ responsibility in crises of accountability. How can artists and the systems that support them rise to the occasion? Are museums places of enlightenment, and if so, should they be held to higher standards than other organizations? What is dirty money, and what should be done with it? Can institutions satisfy their baseline missions without compromise? When is art a space for improving the world, and when is it a cover for nefarious activities? Can art do more—or has it done too much already?

Vera List Center Director and Chief Curator, Carin Kuoni, will introduce the conversation.

Panelists Claire Bishop, Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York Tania Bruguera, artist , artist and activist, founder of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) Tobi Haslett, writer Anne Pasternak, the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum

Moderator David Velasco, Editor of Artforum

This program is presented as part of the Vera List Center’s 2018–2020 curatorial focus If Art Is Politics. It continues a long-standing collaboration between the VLC, Artforum and , which previously included panels on the economics of the art market and the histories of the Whitney biennials. For the video documentation of all VLC events, please visit www.veralistcenter.org. PANELIST BIOGRAPHIES Claire Bishop, a Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has been a regular critic for Artforum since 2006. Her books and articles have been translated into eighteen languages and include Radical Museology, or: What’s “Contemporary” in Museums of Contemporary Art? (Walther König, 2013), Installation Art: A Critical History (Tate, 2005), and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012). Her latest project, a book of conversations with Tania Bruguera, will be published this fall by Fundación Cisneros.

Tania Bruguera is an installation and performance artist based in New York and Havana. Her work has been the subject of exhibitions at international museums including the , New York; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Queens Museum, New York, among others. Bruguera recently opened the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, in Havana, a school, exhibition space, and think tank for activist artists and Cubans. Bruguera contributed to the Vera List Center publication Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017).

Nan Goldin is an artist and activist who lives and works in New York and Berlin. Her photography has been the subject of two major retrospectives and has been shown in museums around the world. She has published fifteen books, among them The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture, 1986). In 2011, Goldin received the RED Award for outstanding work in the field of HIV/ AIDS. She is the founder of P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), a group dedicated to combating the growing opioid epidemic in the U.S. and revealed her own addiction and the role it played in the formation of the group in the January 2018 issue of Artforum.

Tobi Haslett has written about art, film, and literature forHarper’s Magazine, n+1, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He has been a regular contributor to Artforum since 2015.

Anne Pasternak is the Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum. Before joining the museum in 2015, she served as the director of Creative Time, where she initiated projects that gave artists opportunities to respond to political challenges while also expanding their practices globally. One such initiative, the annual Creative Time Summit, remains the largest art and social justice conference in the world. Pasternak has participated in many Vera List Center programs beginning in 1997, most recently at the panel New Visions, New Voices presented in collaboration with ArtTable.

Moderator David Velasco is the current editor of Artforum. VERA LIST CENTER BOARD

The Board of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics is an integral part of the New School community. Members provide counsel to the Vera List Center, develop expertise on ways to support the academic enterprise, offer insight and guidance on programs, provide significant financial support, and serve as links to the communities in which they live and work.

James Keith ( JK) Brown, Chair Mariana Amatullo Carlos Basualdo Frances Beatty Michelle Coffey Gabriella De Ferrari Ronald Feldman Andrew Francis Marilyn Greene Susan Hapgood Elizabeth R. Hilpman Norman L. Kleeblatt Carin Kuoni Thomas Lax Jane Lombard Susan Meiselas Megan E. Noh Mendi and Keith Obadike Nancy Delman Portnoy Silvia Rocciolo Ingrid Schaffner Mary Watson UPCOMING EVENTS

Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies into Darkness For a few more months, the Vera List Center is presenting the seminar series Freedom of Speech, in partnership with four organizations – ARTICLE 19; the National Coalition Against Censorship; New York Peace Institute; and Weeksville Heritage Center. Co-curated by Carin Kuoni and Laura Raicovich, with assistance by Gabriela López Dena (Parsons MA 2019), it examines the four freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: freedom of the press, freedom of assembly and protest, and freedom of religion.

With Indian artist Amar Kanwar’s filmSuch a Morning (2017) as a point of departure, it imagines these four freedoms as points on the compass rose, which can be overlaid with intersectional thinking from artists, Indigenous peoples, feminists, and innumerable other perspectives, to question current circumstances, and to confront the inequities and uncertainties in our times, especially as they pertain to freedom of speech.

Structured as an open curriculum, each seminar looks at a particular aspect of freedom of speech, reflecting on and informed by recent debates around hate speech, censorship, and racism in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Seminar 1: Mapping the Territory Monday, November 12, 2018 In partnership with The National Coalition Against Censorship

Seminar 2: Feminist Manifestos Monday, December 3, 2018

Seminar 3: Pervasive and Personal: Observations on Free Speech Online Monday, February 11, 2019 In partnership with ARTICLE 19

Seminar 4: Say It Like You Mean It: On Translation, Communications, Languages Monday, March 11, 2019

Seminar 5: A Time for Seditious Speech Saturday, April 13, 2019 In partnership with – and presented at – Weeksville Heritage Center Seminar 6: Going Towards the Heat: Speaking Across Difference Monday, June 10, 2019 In partnership with New York Peace Institute

Closing Convening: September 20 & 21, 2019

Each VLC Seminar comes with its own reading, summary, program, and video documentation, all of which can be accessed at www.veralistcenter.org.

For related New School classes, please visit www.newschool.edu. UPCOMING EVENTS LISTING

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: A CURRICULUM FOR STUDIES INTO DARKNESS SEMINAR 6 Going Towards the Heat: Speaking Across Difference Monday, June 10, 6:30–8:30 THE NEW SCHOOL, THERESA LANG COMMUNITY AND STUDENT CENTER 55 WEST 13TH STREET, ROOM 202 NEW YORK CITY

CLOSING CONVENING Freedom of Speech: A Curriculum for Studies Into Darkness September 20 & 21 THE NEW SCHOOL NEW YORK CITY

CONVERSATION Women in Philanthropy Sunday, October 6 THE NEW SCHOOL, TISHMAN AUDITORIUM UNIVERSITY CENTER, 63 5TH AVENUE NEW YORK CITY

Vera List Center Forum 2019 October 24–26 THE NEW SCHOOL NEW YORK CITY

MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED!

Alvin Johnson-J.M.Kaplan Hall 66 West 12th Street, Room 604 New York, NY 10011 212.229.2436 [email protected] www.veralistcenter.org