In celebration of the three major site-specific art installations, commissioned by The New School Art Collection for the new University Center, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics is soliciting student essays about any one of them. The installations by three contemporary masters expand on and engage with the intellectual and architectural foundations of the University Center.
American artist Rita McBride’s Bells and Whistles ties together the entire center: spanning six floors and more than 530 feet, the brass ducts stained gold weave in and out of classrooms and communal spaces, creating an episodic presence of usually invisible infrastructures through a visual journey of the building.
On the first floor, American artist Glenn Ligon’s For Comrades and Lovers streams in argon gas short excerpts of Walt Whitman’s 1855 Leaves of Grass and has them travel around the perimeter walls of the Event Café. As homage to one of New York City’s most iconic poets, the work reflects on Whitman’s lasting impact more than a century later.
In the Arnhold Forum Seventh Floor Reading Room, Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar contributes Searching for Africa in LIFE. A major intervention featuring all covers of LIFE magazine (from its 1936 purchase by Henry Luce to shortly before its demise in 2002) on LED light boxes, the piece explores the politics of representation in mainstream media and interrogates our own assumptions about culture and ethnicity.
With this competition we seek critical and in-depth investigations of any of these three works—or specific aspects thereof. We welcome art historical, iconographic, and contextual studies that expand on these works’ cultural, political, even institutional context.