Winter - 2011 / Spring - 2012

On a strangely warm day during this New York City winter, IDSVA students gathered at The Morgan Library. It was the IDSVA Annual New York Lecture—the day’s event: a presentation by renowned scholar, Bill Brown. Dr. Brown asked his audience to consider: What is contemporary art now? But before answering this question, he posed: “What is the contemporary and when is now?” In this Newsletter, we hope to give you a glimpse into the events, projects, and people that make IDSVA what it is now. Yet, with the rhizomatic structure of our institution now seems incessantly behind us, beside or, in front of us once one attempts pin it down on a page. At IDSVA now is not a point or a place, but a roving constellation that defines itself precisely through movement. What began with a mission and single class of ambitious students, is now an institution with five cohorts of scholars, forty-one students, seven international residency locations, and a worldwide community of artist-philosophers. Maybe this is precisely what makes this institution so terribly exciting— that in the process of defining what this institution is now, it has already become something else.