COURTESY VERA LIST CENTER FOR ARTS AND POLITICS
Victoria Sobel and Casey Gollan have been awarded the 2015–17 fellowship at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, which are part of the New York–based organization’s Post Democracy program.
The Cooper Union graduates are among the many co-founders of the student activist group Free Cooper Union, which protested the college’s decision to charge tuition for the first time in its history, and both Sobel and Gollan contributed to Artforum’s recent “Class Dismissed: A Roundtable on Art School, USC, and Cooper Union” piece, along with artists Frances Stark and Jory Rabinovitz, curator Helen Molesworth, and others.
The fellowship theme of post democracy is described on the New School’s website as “a complex and contradictory term: for some it promises a new lens for the mobilizing forces of social media, considered catalysts for political imagination.”
A statement from Vera List Center explained how Sobel and Gollan will contribute to this program of study:
“During their fellowship, they will explore alternative models of student governance, transparency, and accountability, informed by their ongoing engagement around the controversial introduction of tuition at Cooper Union, their alma mater. With deep commitment to the possibility of reform and resistance from within educational institutions that are subject to increasing pressures to corporatize, they will enact new forms of collaboration and organizing that stretch the limits of institutional critique, calling for a shared space of ‘para-institutionality.’ ”