Conversation, Seminar

Set against the immersive backdrop of James Howell’s studio, Gray Matter is hosted by the James Howell Foundation and presented as a special program accompanying the Vera List Center’s Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series. With an introduction by James Howell Foundation executive director Laura Bardier, the seminar brings together artists Josiah McElheny and Kameelah Janan Rasheed for a conversation, moderated by the VLC’s Carin Kuoni, about the intimate, rigorous relationships they cultivate with material and subject matter. 

Anchored in Howell’s decades-long inquiry into the color gray, the program examines how sustained, meticulous engagement with a material, its physical composition and form, as well as its symbolic significance, becomes a mode of intelligence. Gray Matter draws on Howell’s profound study of gray—its scientific variations, optical effects, and material properties—as a framework for considering how hyperfocused attention shapes artistic perception and practice. His work serves as a quiet but generative interlocutor for artists whose practices merge intellectual rigor with sensorial experimentation, revealing how repetition and embodied inquiries produce knowledge.

Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series
Through modes of shared study, rehearsal, 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. 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. Each seminar is paired with a curated reader on the Matter of Intelligence Are.na channel, grounding the dialogue and opening new paths for exploration.