We are excited to announce our spring 2026 line up of programming, continuing our 2025–2027 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. We 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. Together, we explore intelligence as knowledge or information entangled with power.

We are pleased to offer a preview of upcoming programming, featuring an exhibition, fellow presentations, publications, seminars, and screenings. For updates, visit our website or follow us on Instagram! Register in advance on the individual program pages.

EXHIBITION & PANEL
Robert Rauschenberg & the News: Select Prints from The New School Art Collection
Opening reception and panel: Thursday, February 19, 5:30–8 pm
Exhibition on view through January 2027
Wollman Hall, The New School
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor

Robert Rauschenberg & the News: Select Prints from The New School Art Collection 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 moments of social and political unrest as they unfolded in real time. Co-organized by The New School Art Collection and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the exhibition is presented with the support of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation on occasion of the artist’s Centennial.

Inaugurating the installation, an opening panel discussion on February 19 gathers experts to speak to the artist’s multifaceted practice, expanding on Rauschenberg’s work in relation to journalism, activism, and politics, with curators Juliana Ochs Dweck and Helen Hsu and New School faculty and poet Margaret Rhee, moderated by the VLC’s Carin Kuoni. The opening reception includes an introduction by Emily Clayton, The New School Art Collection, and welcome remarks by The New School president Joel Towers.

READING SERIES
New School New Books 2026
Friday, February 20, 10:30 am–5 pm EST
Wollman Hall, The New School
65 West 11th Street, 5th floor

How do we receive, produce, and distribute information? What platforms are needed to generate and circulate knowledge? Our fourth annual New School New Books reading series reflects on creative and urgent publishing platforms situated within institutions of higher learning, focusing on “intelligence” as knowledge production and the apparatuses that generate it. This program brings together newspapers, magazines, digital publications, and journals run by faculty, students, and staff from across the university. Hosted within the installation Robert Rauschenberg & the News, we touch on modes of timely, critical, creative responses to sociopolitical issues at a moment when such responses are under increased censure, surveillance, and retaliation.

Featuring A Decolonized and Decarbonized Dinner Party; Africa is a Country; Food and Social Justice Action Research Lab; Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal; Lang Office of Civic Engagement and Social Justice; Lit Magazine; the VLC’s Post/doc; Public Seminar; SexTech Lab; The Inquisitive Eater; The New Context; ULTRA-RED: A Journal of Militant Sound Inquiry; 11 and a Half Journal; 12th Street Journal; and many more.

SEMINARS
Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series

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 our 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. Comprising twelve sessions convened from September 2025 through May 2027, the Seminar Series is conceived as an open curriculum and a site for collective inquiry, aiming to question, rethink, and unsettle received notions of what intelligence is, what it does, and what it might yet become. Join us this spring for:

Seminar 4: After the Native Informant
Monday, March 23
6:30–8 pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall

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,  playing with the demand for authenticity or knowledge with irony, opacity, or even misdirection. With curator KJ Abudu and artists Jackson Polys and Selma Selman. Moderated by VLC’s Eriola Pira.

Seminar 5: Gossip Work
Monday, April 27
2–3:30 pm EDT
Online

Gossip, like intelligence, is everywhere and nowhere. 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.

Seminar 6: Scholars and Spies
Monday, May 11
6:30–8 pm 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.

CONVERSATION
IQ Regimes: Race, Metrics, and Mobility
Wednesday, March 4, 8–9:30 pm EST
Online and in person at Composite Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, Brunswick, Australia

As part of her 2025 Stuart Black Fellowship at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia, 2025–2027 VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa hosts historian Quinn Slobodian in a conversation exploring shared concerns around IQ, race, and migration, dovetailing with Joumaa’s VLC Fellowship project, Calibrated Alien. Joumaa and Slobodian extend this inquiry into the present, tracing 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.

SCREEENING
Testing, testing
Thursday, April 9
7–9 pm EDT
e-flux Screening Room
172 Classon Ave, Brooklyn

Presented in collaboration with e-flux Screening Room, Testing, testing brings together artistic and filmic examinations of intelligence testing from historical and archival perspectives, attentive to their ongoing effects in the present and their entanglement with artificial intelligence. Across the program, intelligence emerges as a performative system—one that measures minds, choreographs bodies, and dictates their position in space and in relation to one another. Participants include Coleman Collins, Sandra Erbacher, and Ruth Estévez. Co-curated with Abirami Logendran.

DIGITAL PUBLISHING SERIES
Post/doc

The spring edition of our biannual digital publishing series for discursive, speculative, and experimental writing and artistic practices will feature New Orleans-based tonal geologist and researcher Ryan C. Clarke and Tulsa and New York-based multidisciplinary artist Le’Andra LeSeur. Responding to the Matter of Intelligence focus theme, the two will grapple with sound as matter and material for understanding interpersonal, relational intelligence during times of upheaval and dislocation. Stay tuned for the spring 2026 edition of Post/doc this May, and explore previous editions on our website, including the most recent contributions by Nolan Oswald Dennis and Levani (Levan Mindiashvili).

DIGITAL PROJECT
Matter of Intelligence Are.na

The Matter of Intelligence Are.na is a research and publishing channel accompanying our two-year Focus Theme. It collects and shares the curatorial ideas, questions, and research framework guiding the VLC’s inquiry. The channel is an iterative and continually expanding constellation of materials connected and activated across the VLC’s programmatic strands. It is grounded in a commitment to shared learning, collaborative research, the co-creation of knowledge, and an embodiment of collective intelligence. Each seminar is paired with a curated reader, grounding the dialogue and opening new paths for exploration.