Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural?

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is pleased to present Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural?, an exhibition celebrating the groundbreaking work of Brazilian artist Rosana Paulino, recipient of the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. Inaugurated as part of the VLC Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence, the exhibition is presented at The New School at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Parsons School of Design, from October 9 through November 1, 2026.

Anchored by her landmark artist book ¿História Natural?, the exhibition traces Rosana Paulino’s critical examinations of the entanglements between science, race, knowledge, and power. Bringing together new works and a selection of drawings, prints, and notebooks from the last several years, the exhibition also includes rarely seen materials drawn directly from the artist’s studio. Paulino’s presentation at The New School showcases her expansive practice as both an artist and educator, situating the significance of her work in Brazil within an international context.

Published in 2016, Paulino’s artist book ¿História Natural? challenges the scientific, religious, and political ideologies that were weaponized to legitimize slavery across Brazil and played a central role in shaping the national project envisioned by Brazilian elites in the early 19th century. ¿História Natural?, as well as Paulino’s broader artistic practice since, surpasses these conditions: By layering and reconfiguring colonial-era imagery—faceless Indigenous figures and portraits of enslaved Black women with textile fragments, stained Portuguese tiles, and anatomical sketches—Paulino enacts what Brazilian curator Diane Lima, who nominated Paulino for the prize, calls “epistemic resistance.” Paulino challenges and transgresses the foundations of “natural history” and the claims to objectivity that underlie Eurocentric science’s influence on racial imaginaries, the dispossession and extraction of life on the African continent, and their aftermath in Brazil and across the diaspora.

Conceived as a study room, the exhibition centers on a rare presentation of all eighteen folios of the book, in a display evoking the spaces of study, research, and close reading. Composed of multimedia collages that combine linocut, drypoint, and digital prints with hand applied watercolor and charcoal, and stitched together with red thread, the book is shown in this presentation at the Vera List Center as both a container and conduit. Existing in other editions as a boxed object, here it serves as both a repository and a generative source for the artists’ ongoing explorations of liberation and emancipation, which are foregrounded throughout the exhibition. Accompanying it are notebooks and sketches from the period of the book’s creation, alongside subsequent related works. Together, these works trace the exuberant and liberatory trajectory that Paulino’s practice has taken since she created ¿História Natural?.

Situated within a university context and reflecting the commitments of the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, the exhibition hosts a weekly Black Feminist Study Group centered on Black feminist perspectives, expanding on Paulino’s practice to engage with critical writing on epistemic violence, resistance, and liberation. The first session of the reading group coincides with the exhibition’s opening on Friday, October 9, and is presented as part of the VLC Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence. Subsequent sessions are held on Saturdays, October 17, 24, and 31.

The prize ceremony on October 9 features Paulino in conversation with Diane Lima and Denise Ferreira da Silva. Additional exhibition-related programs to be announced. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that brings together artwork by Paulino, an essay on ¿História Natural? by Diane Lima, and an artist conversation with exhibition co-curators Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira.

Rosana Paulino: ¿História Natural? is presented at The New School as part of the Vera List Center Forum 2026: Matter of Intelligence. It celebrates Rosana Paulino, recipient of the Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. The exhibition is curated by Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira. As part of the exhibition, the Black Feminist Study Group is co-convened by Re’al Christian.