Our Fellowships support the development and presentation of outstanding art and research projects by international, emerging artists, writers, scholars, and activists.

The Boris Lurie Fellowship is awarded biennially to an artist living outside the U.S. Named after Russian-born artist Boris Lurie (1924-2008), Holocaust survivor and founder of the NO!art movement, and in acknowledgment of The New School’s historic University in Exile, the fellowship supports the work of artists living outside the U.S., with special consideration given to those who have faced political hardship.   The Boris Lurie Fellowship is made possible with support from the Boris Lurie Art Foundation. For more information about the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, please visit the foundation’s website.

The 2022–2024 Boris Lurie Fellow is Omar Mismar. The inaugural 2020–2022 fellowship was awarded to the Argentinian collective Etcétera. Read the 2020–2022 Vera List Center Fellowship announcement here. 

About Boris Lurie

Through an extraordinarily layered and continuously evolving artistic oeuvre, consisting of collage, painting, writing, and sculptural pieces, Boris Lurie confronted the overwhelming representation and commercialization of violence as well as the complacency of those in power. With an acute sense of graphic impact, he zoomed in on cruelty and violence in various political, historical, and interpersonal manifestations, informed by the terrorizing experience of losing his mother and sister in the Rumbula Massacre and surviving Nazi death camps as a youth in Latvia. At times, Lurie’s unforgiving depictions of violence as well as labeling a substantial body of his work “No Art” have been critiqued as gestures of rejection or refusal. More recent scholarship makes it clear that Lurie’s stance is anything but disengagement: David Rosenberg, for instance, clarifies that Lurie validates art as medium for testimony[1]. Lóránd Hegyi adds that “Boris Lurie’s politics were a rebellion against repressive ideologies, lies, and manipulation. He understood artistic work as the embodiment of an ethical stand against barbarism, the destruction of life, and the annihilation of culture, and he defined art as fighting against any form of oppression[2].”

[1] Rosenberg, David. “A Missing Link.” In Boris Lurie: NO! Art, 18-24. Paris: Galerie Odile Ouizeman, 2018. Exhibition Catalog

[2] Hegyi, Lorand. “The Power of the Undisguised.” In Boris Lurie: NO! Art, 52-53. Paris: Galerie Odile Ouizeman, 2018. Exhibition Catalog