Revisiting Studies into Darkness: Open Letter in the Dark

Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz interrogates social geographies on a local, regional, and global scale, working at the intersection of problem-solving and trouble-making. Among his first projects is paraSITE (1998-ongoing), a series of custom built inflatable structures designed for unhoused people that attach to the exterior outtake vents of a building’s HVAC system. Recently, he has been the recipient of the 2018-2020 Fourth Plinth commission in London’s Trafalgar Square; the 2020 Nasher Prize; and the 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. His work has appeared in MoMA, Whitechapel Gallery, MassMOCA, and Tate Modern, among others. Rakowitz is a Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

As poetic as it is political and biographical, Emily Jacir’s work investigates histories of colonization, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance, and movement. Drawing on rituals such as dances, processions and games, the artist charts the way space, collectivity, and memories are claimed. She has been the recipient of many awards, most recently an honorary doctorate from NCAD in Dublin, Ireland; an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize (2023); the Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2015); and the Alpert Award (2011). She is the founder of Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.

An artist-theorist and historian, Jill H. Casid holds the appointment of Professor of Visual Studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Casid is bringing to completion Doing Things with Being Undone in the Necrocene, the first part of a two-book project on Form at the Edges of Life. Casid is the author of Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minnesota, 2005), Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minnesota, 2015) which is in Spanish translation (Metales Pesados, 2022), and the co-edited collection Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (Yale, 2014). Casid’s artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the steirischerherbst ’23 in Graz.

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is an artist-focused research center and public forum for art, culture, and politics. It was established at The New School in 1992—a time of rousing debates about freedom of speech, identity politics, and society’s investment in the arts. A leader in the field, the center is a nonprofit that catalyzes and supports politically engaged art, public scholarship, and research throughout the world. It fosters vibrant and diverse communities of artists, scholars, and policymakers who take creative, intellectual, and political risks to bring about positive change.