Pablo Helguera Named Director of the Vera List Center at the New School
The New School in New York has named the artist Pablo Helguera director of its Vera List Center for Art and Politics, ArtNews reported on 5 November 2026. He will also be director of the university's art collection, the same report said.
The Vera List Center is a research centre and public forum for art, culture and politics, based at the New School, a university in Manhattan. Helguera takes over from Carin Kuoni, who had led the centre as senior director and chief curator since 2004. The centre picks a new theme every two years. Its current one is "Matter of Intelligence."
Helguera is a New York-based artist. His work includes installation, sculpture, photography, drawing, performance and socially engaged art, a term for projects built around conversation and participation with the people they involve. Before joining the New School, he spent 13 years as director of adult and academic programmes at the Museum of Modern Art, known as MoMA, in New York.
Since 2020 he has been an assistant professor of arts management and entrepreneurship at the New School's College of Performing Arts. There he oversees a master's programme. He has also written books on socially engaged art, including Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011) and Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World (2012).
His projects range widely. He conceived and directed The School of Panamerican Unrest, which included more than 100 public programmes across 20 countries. He founded Librería Donceles, a Spanish-language used bookshop that has travelled to 13 cities. In 2017 he curated Club Americano at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
His honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a prize for artists and scholars, and a Creative Capital grant, which supports artists' projects. A midcareer retrospective of his work, Pablo Helguera: Socialscapes and Bad Witches, is planned for 2027 at the Sheldon Museum of Art. The Andy Warhol Foundation has given the museum a grant of $100,000 to support the show.
For the centre, the appointment means a new director for a programme that runs talks, reading series and events alongside its research. For the many students who take courses in arts management, it puts an artist and former museum educator in charge of a centre that sits inside their own university.
