Announcement

It is inspiring to consider the life of our friend Ronald Feldman, a founding member of the Vera List Center Advisory Committee (now known as the Vera List Center Board), who passed away on December 20, 2022. A public intellectual, passionate civil rights defender, and discerning art expert, Ron shaped the contemporary world through his visionary gallery as well as through his deep and consistent engagement with progressive political causes. He turned to artists to help clarify some of the intractable challenges of our time. In supporting them and their work, he and his gallery addressed freedom of speech, political representation, and climate change, often long before others did so.

To position artists as agents of political change was not customary when Ron left the legal field and set out for the art world. He opened his eponymous gallery in 1974, and from the beginning supported cutting-edge, provocative, and fearless artists, among them Ilya Kabakov, Helen Mayer & Newton Harrison, Pepón Osorio, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Hannah Wilke. When the Vera List Center for Art and Politics was founded at The New School twenty years later, he and Vera G. List formed a natural alliance, both certain that art belongs to the world and can advance diversity and social justice.

Ron was among the inaugural members of the VLC Advisory Committee and continued his affiliation with us for three decades. Among myriad VLC initiatives, he cared for and supported the very first VLC programs entitled Sustaining Democracy and a number of other forums. He was invested in heated debates on the legitimacy of the National Endowment of the Arts, including The New School’s lawsuit against the NEA, demanding that the “decency clause” be rescinded; whether the United States should have a Secretary of Culture; and the American electoral system in general. He was advising on the VLC exhibition OURS: Democracy in the Age of Branding that coincided with President Obama’s first term in office. He was available to debate notions of “homeland” and the ongoing legacy of the Holocaust, and was passionately interested in freedom of speech and the necessity for artists to speak out on all societal and political issues, at all times and everywhere.

For Ron, joining the VLC Advisory Committee in 1992 was in a way a return to The New School. In 1974, he had organized the first visit to the U.S. by Joseph Beuys, starting with a public lecture held at The New School. It was a watershed event that launched the German artist’s deeply influential and complex presence in the American art world. Says Carin Kuoni, VLC Senior Director/Chief Curator, “During my own early research on Beuys’s influence in the U.S., Ron was the most astute, perceptive observer; and what Beuys tried to do by launching the Green Party in Germany—insisting on environmentalism, and dismantling hierarchies of art and learning—clearly found its champion and soulmate in Ron. It was enormously reassuring to arrive at the VLC years later and discover Ron’s role in its founding. To me, Beuys’s dictum ‘everyone is an artist,’ speaks so directly to Ron’s aspiration and his expansive and generous mind.”

Ron had a particular interest in research-driven art practices, represented by artists such as Brandon Ballangée and Sam Van Aken and by the VLC Fellowships. He hosted the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the VLC Fellowships in 2018, a joyous convening at his historic SoHo gallery, with presentations by VLC Fellows Lorraine O’Grady and Walid Raad. James Keith (JK) Brown, who has served as chair of the VLC Board since 2004, observes, “I remember well Ron’s profound respect for Vera List, whom he called one of his closest friends. He also spoke of artists as the public intellectuals of the day. Like many of us in New York, I followed the gallery program for years, but that evening was special, with tributes to those who had passed and a celebration of emerging artists. Now that the Center has turned thirty, it’s inspiring to see how passion, determination, and clarity of purpose enabled Ron and the early VLC Committee to launch our Center and set it on a strong path.”

The potent place between activism, politics, and aesthetic practices is one that Ron and Frayda Feldman occupied with gusto and aplomb. Mary Watson, Executive Dean of the Schools of Public Engagement at The New School and a long-time VLC Board Member, adds, “Ron along with Frayda created space for countless makers and artists to explore our collective polity, and his vision had a profound impact on the trajectory of the Vera List Center. Ron knew intrinsically that while art can inspire and transform how we engage with our communities, to help us meet critical moments in time, art should also provide a medium to reimagine purpose, advance important movements, and include more perspectives.”

We will always be grateful to Ron for his years of service to the Vera List Center and his careful stewardship of our mission. We will miss him and his wise counsel dearly.

Please visit the gallery website for a full tribute to Ronald Feldman, here.
The New York Times obituary by Roberta Smith, here.
Artforum.com obituary, here.