The Vera List New School Art Collection Writing Awards are bestowed annually to students at The New School for the best essays inspired by works in the university’s art collection. This year the judges will consider non-text based media such as film, photography, visuals, music and sound, architecture, or the Web, revisiting the notion of “the essay,” in addition to prose and poetic responses.

For the 2012–2013 award cycle, you are invited to identify an artwork in The New School Art Collection that relates to Thingness, the Vera List Center’s curatorial focus theme this year, and to submit a visual or text-based entry inspired by such a work.

Thingness is the term used for the center’s multi-faceted, two-year inquiry into the nature of our material world. The programs on Thingness call for a comprehensive and new understanding of the relationship between objects and people that counters the pervasiveness of social media, and might provoke more responsible, ethical, and ecologically sound politics.

All students enrolled in The New School are eligible. There are two $400 first place awards and two $200 second place awards. Winners are announced online in The New School News early in the spring semester. Winning entries will be featured in a joint celebratory and public reading, edited by a professional editor, and published in next year’s edition of the award newspaper as well as online atwww.veralistcenter.org.

GUIDELINES FOR ENTRIES

Any currently enrolled New School student is eligible.

Text entries should not exceed 2,500 words.

Time-based or audio submissions should be approximately three to five minutes in length.
For two-dimensional and three-dimensional submissions, restrictions are flexible. Please e-mail vlc@newschool.edu and inquire about details.

All submissions must be submitted via the Vera List Center email:vlc@newschool.edu.

Please note that all submissions must list your name, mailing and email addresses, phone number, university program in which you are enrolled, and your New School student ID number.

The artwork that inspired the essay must be clearly identified by the artist’s name and the work’s title, date, and location on campus.

Entries must be received by Monday, February 18, 2013.

Please call the Vera List Center at 212.229.2436 with questions.

JURY 2011-2012

Carin Kuoni, Director, Vera List Center for Art and Politics
Joshua Mack, member, Vera List Center Advisory Committee 
Rosemary O’Neill, Associate Professor of Art History, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons The New School for Design
Robert Polito, Director, Writing Program and MFA in Creative Writing, The New School for Public Engagement
Silvia Rocciolo, Co-curator, The New School Art Collection
Juliet Tarantino, student representative and candidate for M.A. in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research
Wendy Walters, Assistant Professor, Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts