Pablo Helguera Named Director of New School's Vera List Center

Pablo Helguera started work this week as director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (VLC) at the New School, doubling as director of the university's art collection. He succeeds Carin Kuoni, who led the center since 2004.

The New School hired from within. Helguera has been an assistant professor of arts management and entrepreneurship at its College of Performing Arts since 2020, where he oversees a master's program. Before that came 13 years as director of adult and academic programs at the Museum of Modern Art.

"It feels like such a wonderful transition," Helguera told ARTnews in a phone interview. "It's exactly what I've done my whole career. I've been a programmer forever and there's very few people of my species."

What is the Vera List Center?

Founded in 1992 and named for life trustee Vera G. List (1908–2002), an art collector and philanthropist, the VLC supports research, teaching, exhibitions, publications, and public programs. It runs on an annual operating budget of $1.1 million, with backing from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Its signature event is an annual public forum, and under Kuoni it adopted a new theme every two years; the current one is "Matter of Intelligence."

JK Brown, chair of the VLC advisory board, praised the appointment in a statement. "Pablo Helguera brings an extraordinary combination of artistic vision, intellectual curiosity, and institutional experience to the Vera List Center for Art and Politics," Brown said. "His commitment to socially engaged art and the role of artists in shaping public life aligns deeply with the Center's mission." Brown also credited Kuoni with building "an institution of international significance, grounded in rigorous inquiry, artistic experimentation, and a profound commitment to social justice."

Who is Helguera?

A fixture of socially engaged practice (art that treats community involvement as its medium, not a byproduct), Helguera has a CV that reads like a programmer's wish list:

• Conceived and directed "The School of Panamerican Unrest," with more than 100 public programs across 20 countries.
• Founded Librería Donceles, a Spanish-language used bookstore that has traveled to 13 cities.
• Curated "Club Americano" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2017); served as "pedagogical curator" of the Eighth Mercosul Biennial (2011) and "cultural mediator" for Manifesta 15 in Barcelona (2024).
• Wrote two books published by Jorge Pinto Books: Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World (2012).
• Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital grant, and support from A Blade of Grass, Franklin Furnace, and Art Matters.

At MoMA, he developed symposia including an annual forum on contemporary art, and conceived Artists Experiment, which brought Nina Katchadourian, Michael Rakowitz, and Caroline Woolard into dialogue with museum educators. Earlier he shaped public programming at the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His two-artist show with Suzanne Lacy, "The Schoolhouse and the Bus," featured in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA in 2018. This summer, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Nebraska received a $100,000 Warhol Foundation grant for "Pablo Helguera: Socialscapes and Bad Witches," a midcareer retrospective planned for 2027.

Why the timing matters

Helguera's first week coincided with an electoral realignment: Democrats flipped Senate and House seats and won governorships in deep-red territory, a shift not seen since the aftermath of Watergate. Florida's outgoing Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, called Election Day "close to an extinction level event."

"I'm so lucky," Helguera said. "We've lived through dark times for democracy, and this is an enormous event that allows us to think again: How do we rebuild trust in democratic institutions, and what role can artists play in helping us think about democracy and about what populism means? These questions are super-important right now. How can we ask them from a place of hope rather than the despair we have lived in for 10 years?"

A center devoted to art and politics now has a programmer-director who frames hope, not despair, as the working method.