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  • EXH: PEASANTS, CLANS, AND EFFERVESCENT ABSOLUTISTS!

    EXH: PEASANTS, CLANS, AND EFFERVESCENT ABSOLUTISTS!

    Tuesday, September 4, 2018 to Thursday, October 18, 2018 Harriman Institute Atrium, 12th Floor International Affairs Building (420 W 118th St) Exhibit runs September 4 – October 18, 2018. Exhibit hours are Monday–Friday, 9:00AM – 5:00PM excluding university holidays.

    Artist Anne Bobroff-Hajal has a PhD in Russian History and is the author of the scholarly volume Working Women in Russia Under the Hunger Tsars. Her extensively researched polyptychs are satirical commentaries on how Russia’s ruling elites have historically taken advantage of their unique geographic situation to amass and maintain power. She means for her art to honor and serve the dispossessed and forgotten.

    Bobroff-Hajal’s work draws formally on the similarities among icons, political cartoons, animation storyboards, and graphic novels, all of which tell stories in pictures. Her tales are told across centuries to the Infant Stalin by three tsarist godparents: Ivan IV, Catherine the Great, and Peter the Great. Each polyptych is “narrated” via the artist’s original lyrics set to the tune of Kalinka, in a series of tableaux which viewers “read” through numbered frames or simply from left to right. Bobroff-Hajal’s goal is to beguile viewers to identify and engage with forces that have shaped power structures in Russia and other parts of the world.

    Intellectually, Bobroff-Hajal’s work brings together disparate fields’ analyses of Russia: historians of ideology who have observed Russian elites’ centuries-old use of the threat of invasion to unify the country behind an autocratic leader; global history scholars like Perry Anderson who wrote that “Eastern Absolutism…was the price of [Russians’] survival in a civilization of unremitting territorial warfare;” geographers who have described Russia as “the least defensible country on earth” because of its vast flatland steppes devoid of natural barriers to invasion. Putin today is only the most recent Russian ruler to manipulate threat of invasion across the plains to support extreme appropriation of wealth and power from the populace for the benefit of ruling elites.

    Bobroff-Hajal’s 110-page fully illustrated catalogue is now published online, with extensive historical analysis and info about her artistic process. Please click here to access the catalogue. For best results view using the “full screen” function.

    Historian J. Arch Getty wrote,

    Anne Bobroff-Hajal’s art combines deep historical knowledge with humor and artistic talent that speaks to audiences ranging from school children to professors. I cannot imagine a more distinctive and iconoclastic combination. In her formidable painting of Ivan IV, his stern face conveys a series of meanings, and the postures of his underlings depict patronage and clan relationships that reflect the latest historical research on the 16th century. Her paintings of Stalin with Bolshevik patronage clans show a similar skill and informed artistry that also capture recent research. Her Catherine the Great, who ‘flies’ by means of stilt-walking serfs hoisting her and her heavy decorative gold wings, does more, and more vividly than many books on Catherine. The whimsical style of her work allows it (like icons of old) to tell stories on many levels, ranging from the nearly comic to an accomplished complexity. Her work is truly unique and deserves a wide audience.

    From the artist:

    “I’ve been asked how I can bear to spend so much time painting brutality and horrors. I do it because art—with its color, beauty, satire, story, whimsy—is the tool we humans have to lift us from despair as we investigate the sources of atrocities so as to combat them in the future.

    How do elites—not only in Russia, but the world over—amass the power to do such terrible things to less powerful people? What are the resources rulers use to accumulate power? How do they exploit those resources to maintain their omnipotence? How have some some regions of the world been able to wield dominion over other regions?

    Russian absolutism, as historian Perry Anderson observed, not only began earlier than in Europe, it “outlived all its contemporaries, to become the only Absolutist State in the continent to survive intact into the 20th century.” The 1917 collapse of the Tsarist autocracy was followed a decade after the Bolshevik Revolution by the rising Joseph Stalin’s “Communist” autocracy. That in turn collapsed in the 1990s, to be followed a decade later by the rise of a new autocrat-in-the-making, Vladimir Putin. Why do distinctive historic cycles recur in each region of the globe, and how can they be broken?

    I believe that each land’s distinct geography presents singular opportunities for elites to build and sustain power. In particular, Russia is by far the planet’s largest flat landscape. Geographers have called Russia the least defensible terrain on earth because of its lack of natural barriers against hugely powerful neighbors. My art explores the web of interconnections between Russia’s unique geography—both natural and human—and its rulers, clans, and laboring classes. I paint the social system Russia’s geography gives rise to, the elites it empowers, and hundreds of tiny portraits of individual people straining to achieve their goals within that system.

    It may seem obsessional to paint so many three-inch-high portraits in such a time-intensive way, often using a magnifying glass to paint each face and detail. But I create art to honor and hopefully serve the dispossessed and forgotten. My goal is for my art to delight viewers to identify forces that have shaped varying power structures in different parts of the world, in order to illuminate how they might create change within their own.”

  • EXH: From Non-Conformism to Feminisms: Russian Women Artists from the Kolodzei Art Foundation at the Museum of Russian Art (TMORA), September 15, 2018 – February 10, 2019

    EXH: From Non-Conformism to Feminisms: Russian Women Artists from the Kolodzei Art Foundation at the Museum of Russian Art (TMORA), September 15, 2018 – February 10, 2019

    From Non-Conformism to Feminisms: Russian Women Artists from the Kolodzei Art Foundation at the Museum of Russian Art (TMORA), 5500 Stevens Ave S. Minneapolis, Minnesota 55419, September 15, 2018 – February 10, 2019

    The project Non-Conformism to Feminisms: Russian Women Artists from the Kolodzei Art Foundation is a selection from the Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art, covering three generations of artists, from the 1960’s to the present. The show includes paintings, works on paper, photography, video, and interactive installations. Arranged thematically, the exhibition features the work of emerging, mid-career and established artists. It is a visual exploration of the development and accomplishments of women artists from Russia emphasizing the importance of media experimentation for contemporary Russian women artists in defining their identity.

    The first generation consists of artists who began their careers at the time of Khrushchev’s “Thaw” of the 1950’s and took part in the first, crucial, unofficial exhibitions of the 1970’s, including Lydia Masterkova, Valentina Kropivnitskaya, Tatiana Levitskaia, Natalia Shibanova, and Rimma Gerlovina. The next generation includes artists who participated in the initial exhibitions and others who became involved in the early 1980’s, including Natalia Nesterova, Tatyana Nazarenko, Olga Bulgakova, Anna Birshtein, Natalia Abalakova, Lusy Voronova, Diana Vouba, Svetlana Kalistratova, and Valentina Lebedeva-Lesin. The latest generation is made up of artists whose works date from post-perestroika and post-Soviet period from the late 1980’s to the present, including Irina Danilova, Natalia Kamenetskaia, Alexandra Dementieva, Alla Esipovich, Marina Koldobskaya, Tatiana Antoshina, Irene Caesar, Elena Kallistova, Marina Kolotvina, Victoria Kovalenchikova, Natalia Elkonina, Dorothee Chemiakine, Marina Karpova, Anna Frants, Tatiana Krol, Elena Gubanova, Ludmila Belova, Olga Tobreluts, Aidan Salakhova, Katya Filippova, Elena Sarni, Svetlana Martinchik, Marina Gertsovskaya, Alena Anosova, Marina Chernikova, Innessa Levkova-Lamm, Olga Lamm, Tatiana Daniliyants, Julia Winter, and Natalia Sitnikova.

    Though an exhibition like this one can show only a fraction of what is being done by Russian women artists, we hope this show will encourage viewers to find out more about the world of Russian Art. Today, by analyzing works by Russian women artists from positions of gender discourse, we can find unique forms of expression. Gender-based research allows us to have a new view of non-conformist art, finding in its stories yet another subject of inquiry. The project >From Non-Conformism to Feminisms: Russian Women Artists from the Kolodzei Art Foundation is designed to generate public awareness of Russian women in art, and to empower women artists to pursue their calling. #NonConformismToFeminisms

    The Kolodzei Art Foundation, Inc., a US-based 501(c)(3) not-for-profit public foundation started in 1991, organizes exhibitions and cultural exchanges in museums and cultural centers in the United States, Europe and Russia, often utilizing the considerable resources of the Kolodzei Collection, and publishes books on Russian art. The Kolodzei Collection of Russian and Eastern European Art is one of the world’s largest collections, consisting of over 7,000 works by more than 300 artists from Russia and the former Soviet Union. For more information, visit http://www.kolodzeiart.org.

    The Museum of Russian Art is conveniently located at the intersection of 35W and Diamond Lake Road in South Minneapolis. Open daily; free parking lot available. For more information, visit TMORA.org, or call 612-821-9045.

  • CFP: Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art

    CFP: Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art

    The Post-socialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies UCL, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, is launching a new research project entitled Confrontations: Sessions in East European Art History.

    Led by Dr Maja Fowkes and Dr Reuben Fowkes, the project investigates the entangled histories of East European art through a series of itinerant symposia held at pertinent locations across and beyond the region. By staging encounters between contrasting aesthetic and critical positions and creating conditions for comparative insights to crystallise, these sessions aim to instigate more rigorous and integrated accounts of East European art history. Acknowledging the singularity of individual practices, the multi-directional flow of artistic exchange and the generative effects of local circumstances, this transnational initiative is a contribution to an emergent global history of art from the Second World War till today.

    The title of the project refers to the series of Confrontations exhibitions held in Czechoslovakia in the years around 1960 and again in the spirit of post-modernist revival during the mid-1980s. While the original studio exhibitions were a means for young artists to challenge the dominance of socialist realism and figurative art by embracing the international style of art informel, those held at the end of the socialist period were organised in aesthetic opposition to the ethos of the dissident neo-avant-garde. What these two moments of contestation had in common was a willingness to challenge established artistic paradigms, a critical attitude to dominant institutions and a boldly experimental character. They also correspond chronologically to the two art historical periods with which this research project is primarily concerned.

    Early and mid-career scholars are encouraged to apply to participate in four meetings to be held in Ljubljana/Zagreb, Prague/Bratislava, London/Paris and Warsaw/Łódź over 2019-20. Each of the four sessions is conceived as a week-long gathering with a core group of participants who will engage in seminar discussions, give presentations of their research, as well as take part in a programme of visits to relevant sites such as museums, galleries, artist studios or specialist archives. The topics of each meeting will be devised to draw on the strengths of local collections and points of primary art historical interest in the specific cities in which they are held. Each participant is expected to actively participate in discussions and give two research papers over the course of the project. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered. Participants must commit to attending all four meetings for the full duration.

    Applications are particularly sought from post-doctoral researchers and early career scholars from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe inclusive of the Baltic States and the Balkans, as well as from those who study the art history of the region from further afield. While researchers specialised in any aspect of post-war East European art history are encouraged to apply, we are keen to recruit participants with an interest in engaging with under-researched topics including socialist realism, art informel, neo-constructivism and pop art, as well as the post-avant-garde, post-modern and alternative art currents of the 1980s.

    To apply, please submit a single word or pdf document with:

    1) Your name, email address, institutional affiliation, and postal address.

    2) An applicant statement (approximately two pages)

    This should state what you would bring to the programme, the nature of your current work and involvement with East European art history, and what you believe you could gain through your participation in the Confrontations project.

    3) A short CV

    This should consist of a two-page CV, including a selection of your most relevant publications or research projects.

    For enquiries, please contact Maja Fowkes or Reuben Fowkes by email fowkes@translocal.org

    Please email the documents specified above as a single document to confrontations@translocal.org by Friday 9 November 2018.

    Selection of the participants will be made based on the recommendations of the project team comprising Dr Maja Fowkes (PACT UCL), Dr Reuben Fowkes (PACT UCL), Dr Pavlina Morganová (Academy of Fine Arts in Prague), Dr Tomasz Załuski (Institute of Contemporary Culture, University of Łódź) and Alina Șerban (art historian and curator, Bucharest).

    We aim to notify applicants of the outcomes by the end of November.

    For more information see: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/news/2018/oct/east-european-art-history-initiative-launched-support-getty-foundation-grant

    http://translocal.org/confrontations/index.html

  • CONF: Lost and Found Spaces: Displacements in Eastern European Art and Society in the 1990s

    The Kumu Art Museum’s fall conference 2018

    01.–03.11.2018 in the auditorium of the Kumu Art Museum

    The sixth Kumu Art Museum’s fall conference focuses on art and society in post-socialist Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

    Fundamental political, social and cultural changes that took place after the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union have been analysed in numerous publications and at many seminars and conferences. The Kumu Art Museum’s fall conference aims for a re-evaluation of these changes in relation to the notion of “space” and concepts of “spatiality”, and examines social and cultural processes in Eastern Europe in the 1990s through spatial interactions.

    The “spatial turn” in the humanities and social sciences in the late 1980s emerged at the crossroads of critical theory, poststructuralism, postcolonialism and other intellectual movements that shaped the last decades of the 20th century, and was inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and others. The turn brought about a new kind of attentiveness to the agency of physical, but also conceptual or imaginary, space/s in social relations and cultural production. Space was not looked at as a neutral area or container where things take place and time flows through, but as something that organises and expresses power relations, gives meanings to events and is always part of what happens.

    Post-socialist spaces of the 1990s can be understood as physical, geographical, sociological, political, psychological, cultural, virtual or metaphorical spaces that are not necessarily fixed, but may be fluid and changeable. Eastern Europe can be looked at as one space or as a conglomerate of multiple spaces; the culture of the 1990s may be analysed through creation and destruction, foundation and disappearance, displacements and collisions of spaces.

    The conference focuses on Eastern European art histories, but also welcomes presentations from other disciplines that help to explain art historical processes. We are looking forward to both theoretical contributions and case studies of artistic phenomena from the 1990s.

    The conference will focus on five topics:

    I Lost and found spaces

    Old and new networks in the art world, new practices and technologies, thinking spaces and utopias, travelling and migration

    II Creating spaces

    The figure of the curator in the art scene, discursive models of curating, creating communities, new art events and institutions

    III Mapping spaces

    Role models in the global art world, conflicts between internal and external identities, power positions, included and excluded spaces

    IV Taking over spaces

    New strategies of self-assertion, alternatives for national and neoliberal narratives, critical exhibitions and institutions

    V Living spaces

    Everyday life, history and ways of remembering, subjective positions, gender relations and psychological changes in the art world

    The opening lecture will be held by Viktor Misiano. Invited speakers include Boris Buden (Berlin), Renata Salecl (University of Ljubljana), Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University) and Larry Wolff (New York University).

    Conference board: Anu Allas (Kumu Art Museum), Sirje Helme (Art Museum of Estonia), Anders Härm (Institute of Art History and Visual Culture at the Estonian Academy of Arts) and Viktor Misiano (Moscow Art Magazine).

    Along with the conference, an exhibition of Estonian art of the 1990s (curated by Eha Komissarov and Anders Härm) will open in the Kumu Art Museum, and the third Kumu Art Film Festival KuFF, which focuses on the film and video productions of the 1990s, will take place. Selected conference papers will be published in The Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia.

    Conference Programme

  • SHERA Emerging Scholar Prize - Call for Entries (Deadline: 22 October 2018)

    The Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) is pleased to announce the second annual call for submissions for the SHERA Emerging Scholar Prize. The award aims to recognize and encourage original and innovative scholarship in the field of East European, Eurasian, and Russian art and architectural history. The winner will be announced at the Society’s annual meeting at ASEEES, scheduled for Friday, December 7, 2018.

    Applicants must have published an English-language article in a scholarly print or online journal, or museum print or online publication within the preceding twelve-month period. For the 2018 prize, articles published between September 30, 2017 and September 30, 2018 are eligible. Additionally, applicants are required to have received his or her PhD within the last 5 years (2013 or thereafter for the 2018 prize) and be a member of SHERA in good standing at the time that the application is submitted. The winner will be awarded $500 and republication (where copyright allows) or citation of the article on H-SHERA.

    To apply, please email a CV including contact information (email, mailing address, and telephone) and a copy of the English-language article with header/colophon of the journal or catalogue together with a brief abstract to shera.prizes@gmail.com no later than October 22, 2018.

    To join or renew membership in the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA), please visit http://shera-art.org/membership/join-shera.php.

    Last year’s awardee was Prof. Christina E. Crawford of Emory University for her essay “From Tractors to Territory: Socialist Urbanization through Standardization.”

  • CONF: On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World

    CONF: On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World

    reative Time is pleased to announce programming for its 11th Creative Time Summit, an annual convening for thinkers, dreamers, and doers working at the intersection of art and politics. The Summit will be held in Miami for the first time this November 1-3, 2018.

    Titled On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World, it takes coalition as a central theme, and utilizes the archipelago as a framework to delve into Miami’s historical connection to the Caribbean and, by extension, to Latin America and the entire world. The topics under discussion will range from immigration and borders to climate realities notions of intersectional justice, gentrification, tourism as an enabler for neocolonialism, and the roles art and activism can play in all these pressing issues.

    “50 years after the upheavals of 1968, we continue to grapple with a host of pressing issues, from the ongoing legacies of colonialism to climate change and xenophobia,” said Creative Time Executive Director Justine Ludwig. “There’s no better place for this conversation than Miami, a home to so many incredible artists, activists, and thinkers. We couldn’t be prouder to host the summit here, or of the participants and the invaluable insights they’ll be bringing to bear on some of the most critical issues of our time.”

    This year’s summit is co-presented with the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, with leading support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight Arts Challenge. Passes are available on a sliding scale from $25 – $300 — register here. For the full program, click here.

    “Artists continue to be the leading voices in times of change,” stated Michael Spring, Senior Advisor to the Mayor and Director of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. “Historically, our community has been a fulcrum of cultural and social change, and the Creative Time Summit offers a unique opportunity for artists to come together to explore the intersection of arts and politics in a city that continues to be at the center of it all. We are proud to co-present the summit and bring it to Miami for the first time.”

    CREATIVE TIME SUMMIT: On Archipelagoes And Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies To Inhabit The World
    Thursday, November 1 – Saturday, November 3

    Thursday, November 1
    Opening Party at the Perez Art Museum Miami

    Friday, November 2
    Full day of main stage presentations at the Knight Concert Hall at the Adrienne Arsht Center

    Saturday, November 3
    Breakout sessions at various locations across Miami, and outdoor film series at SoundScape Park

    This year’s Summit commemorates a milestone in the history of international coalitions and solidarity: the resilience of the global uprisings of 1968. Half a century later, the Summit will gather dozens of cultural critics, artists, and activists to discuss strategies for political cooperation in the face of social unrest and environmental collective struggles.

    Miami is a symbol of connectedness — whether, as a polyglot city and hub for migration, in terms of our connections to one another, or, as a city already grappling with the effects of climate change, our dependence on the natural world. Embracing this context, On Archipelagoes and Other Imaginaries will shed light onto international migrations and depopulation, queer cultures, indigenous ways of being, tourism industries, and ecological disasters by engaging with de-colonial dialogues and new social imaginaries.

    The Summit will be broken up into four thematic sections: “Facing climate realities, reimagining a green future,” “Toward an intersectional justice,” “Resisting displacement and violence,” and “On boundaries and a borderless future.”

    These themes will be explored through community-driven breakout sessions, social events, roundtable discussions, workshops, panels, field trips, interactive performances, screenings, and other creative formats designed to share tools, strategies, and actions with over 1,000 international and local attendees. Breakout sessions will be happen across the city, working in collaboration with the community leaders and groups that preserve and honor these living histories, by de-centering knowledge bases, platforms for learning and the typical architects of change. The Summit will engage with the tools for resistance, solidarity, and coalition, while offering moments for celebration through programming at Summit social events.

    The Summit will hold its inaugural Film Series in Miami-Beach, featuring showings by filmmakers from the Miami-Florida area, the Caribbean, Latin America, and beyond, highlighting the richness and diversity of independent filmmaking. The selected films broadly engage with the major themes of this year’s Summit, encouraging thoughtful conversations around borders and migration, ecological struggles, gender politics, and economic inequality.

    Bhenji Ra, genderqueer performance and interdisciplinary artist; Vijay Prashad, Indian historian, journalist, and Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research; Brigada Puerta de Tierra, the grassroots artist collective from Puerto Rico; Timothy Morton, Professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, and member of the object-oriented philosophy movement; Edwidge Danticat, Award-winning author of several books and 2009 MacArthur fellow; and Krudas Cubensi, Cuban activist, queer, and feminist hip hop group are amongst this year’s participants. Full list below.

    The 2018 Creative Time Summit is curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose in collaboration with Corina L. Apostol.

    PARTICIPANTS (LIST IN FORMATION) Participants include Zach Blas, Brigada Puerta de Tierra, Colectivo Universitario de Disidencia Sexual (CUDS), Houston Cypress, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Edwidge Danticat (Keynote), Pablo Desoto, Marilyn Douala Bell, Elvis Fuentes, Krudas Cubensi, Anna Minton, Timothy Morton (Keynote), Yanelys Nuñez Leyva, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, Dan Perjovschi, Lia Perjovschi, Vijay Prashad (Keynote), Bhenji Ra, Colibrí Sanfiorenzo Barnhard, William Cordova, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, and more to be announced.

    CREATIVE TIME SUMMIT 2018 ADVISORY COUNCIL
    Elvis Fuentes, Independent Curator based in New York and Miami
    Jane Gilbert, Chief Resilience Officer, City of Miami
    Tom Healy, Writer and Curator based in Miami and New York
    Meena Jagannath, Co-founder of the Community Justice Project and Movement Lawyer based in Miami
    Gean Moreno, Curator of Programs, ICA Miami
    Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Co-director of Beta-Local, Puerto Rico
    Amanda Sanfilippo Long, Curator and Artist Manager of Art in Public Places, Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, Director and Chief Curator of Fringe Projects, Miami Dr. Amanda Cachia, Accessibility Advisor, Curator and Disability Activist, based in California

    SUMMIT 2018 PROJECT SUPPORT
    2018 Creative Time Summit: On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries: Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World is co-presented with Art in Public Places of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs with leading support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

  • EXH: Erosion: Works by Leonard Ursachi

    EXH: Erosion: Works by Leonard Ursachi

    Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection at Hebrew Home at Riverdale is pleased to announce its latest exhibition, Erosion: Works by Leonard Ursachi on view from July 15–November 18, 2018. In this exhibition featuring an outdoor sculpture, installation work, and related maquettes and drawings, Leonard Ursachi addresses themes of environmental and social crises caused by manmade events and reflects on how the destruction of natural resources is intimately interconnected with the effacement of human history and culture. What a Wonderful World (2018), a large-scale sculpture installed in Hebrew Home’s sculpture garden overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades, touches on the inextricable link between profitability and the destruction of the environment. Expanses of 23-karat gold leaf applied to the roughly textured, “tarred” oceans reference a global, often wealth-driven disregard for the impact of environmental choices. The continents, on the other hand, appear vast and devoid of life, signifying a stripping away of natural resources. Still, Ursachi’s vision implies hope: the sculpture’s egg shape may be read as the enduring, if fragile, potential for life.

    Also included in the exhibition is Rise and Shine (2010), a multi-media work that addresses the disappearance of the Romanian island of Ada Kaleh, which was submerged in the Danube River in 1970 by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in order to build a hydroelectric plant. Inside an aquarium-like receptacle, a model of the island cast from translucent urethane resin is lit from below, alternately drowned and resuscitated as water continuously rises and falls. The work addresses the disastrous effect such industrial projects have on human culture, displacing entire populations and literally washing away layers of history. The piece engages environmental themes and reflects the unchecked destruction that can occur under tyranny. Ceaușescu’s rule was one of the most brutal in the Eastern Bloc, with his secret police force routinely torturing and imprisoning suspected dissenters and political enemies. Ursachi was arrested for attempting to escape Romania by swimming across the Danube—near the spot where Ada Kaleh once stood—to reach Yugoslavia in 1978. His second attempt to defect, in 1980, was successful, and he was granted political asylum in France where he spent five years. He came to the United States via Canada and settled in New York in 1987.

  • OPP: SHERA Travel Grant Announcement

    Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture invites applications for a SHERA Travel Grant to the upcoming ASEEES 50th Annual Convention, Boston MA, December 6-9, 2018.

    GRANT AMOUNT: $1000 USD for travel from North America and $1,500 for travel from overseas (another continent)

    ELIGIBILITY:
    All applicants must be:

    1. A student working at either the master’s or doctoral level with a thesis or dissertation topic related to Eastern European, Eurasian and/or Russian art and/or Architecture;
    2. Presenting a paper at a panel at this year’s ASEEES Conference (chairs, discussants, and any other type of participants are not eligible to apply)
    3. A member of SHERA at the time of application;
    4. Live outside the conference city;
    5. Have not been recipients of this grant in the past.

    DEADLINE: August 15, 2018
    Notifications will be sent by September 15, 2018

    APPLICATIONS must be emailed to:
    SHERA Art and Architecture
    as well as Karen Kettering

    • Complete with contact information, paper title, and abstract,
    • Brief CV, listing relevant grants, publications, and talks.

    GRANT DISBURSEMENT:
    The grant will be disbursed at SHERA’s Business Meeting at the ASEEES conference by Vice President/President Elect Karen Kettering.

    Sincerely,
    SHERA Board

  • CFP: Eclecticism at the Edges: Medieval Art and Architecture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres (c.1300-c.1550)

    CFP: Eclecticism at the Edges: Medieval Art and Architecture at the Crossroads of the Latin, Greek, and Slavic Cultural Spheres (c.1300-c.1550)

    Date: April 5-6, 2019 Location: Princeton University

    Organizers: Alice Isabella Sullivan, Ph.D. (University of Michigan) Maria Alessia Rossi, Ph.D. (The Index of Medieval Art, Princeton University)

    Description: In response to the global turn in art history, this two-day symposium explores the temporal and geographic parameters of the study of medieval art, seeking to challenge the ways we think about the artistic production of Eastern Europe. Serbia, Bulgaria, and the Romanian principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania, among other centers, took on prominent roles in the transmission and appropriation of western medieval, byzantine, and Slavic artistic traditions, as well as the continuation of the cultural legacy of Byzantium in the later centuries of the empire, and especially in the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

    This symposium will be the first such initiative to explore, discuss, and focus on the art, architecture, and visual culture of regions of the Balkans and the Carpathians (c.1300-c.1550). We aim to raise issues of cultural contact, transmission, and appropriation of western medieval, byzantine, and Slavic artistic and cultural traditions in eastern European centers, and consider how this heritage was deployed to shape notions of identity and visual rhetoric in these regions from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. This event will offer a comparative and multi-disciplinary framework, ranging from art history to archeology and from material culture to architectural history.

    We aim to create a platform where scholars at various stages of their careers can discuss their research and engage in dialogue regarding the specificities but also the shared cultural heritage of these regions of Eastern Europe that developed eclectic visual vocabularies and formed a cultural landscape beyond medieval, byzantine, and modern borders.

    Papers could address topics that include, but are not limited to:  How cross-cultural contact facilitated the transfer, appropriation, and transmission of ideas and artistic traditions across geographical and temporal boundaries in Eastern Europe (c.1300-c.1550)  Artistic and iconographic developments as expressions of particular social, political, and ecclesiastical circumstances and dialogues in the Balkans and the Carpathians  The intentions and consequences of diplomatic missions and dynastic marriages in the visual agenda of eastern European centers  Workshop practices and traveling artists beyond medieval political and religious borders  Patronage and new constructs of identity before and after 1453

    Interested scholars should submit a paper title, a 500-word abstract, and a CV by August 15, 2018 to the organizers at: eclecticism.symposium@gmail.com

    Funds will be available to defray the cost of travel and accommodations for participants whose papers are accepted in the Symposium. So far, this event is supported in part by the International Center of Medieval Art (www.medievalart.org), the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture (www.shera-art.org), as well as The Index of Medieval Art at Princeton University.

  • EXH: First U.S. Museum Retrospective of Soviet Nonconformist Artist Leonid Lamm

    EXH: First U.S. Museum Retrospective of Soviet Nonconformist Artist Leonid Lamm

    New Brunswick, NJ – With such rapid advances in digital tools, we sometimes find ourselves lamenting about artists who were ahead of their time, guessing what Leonardo could have done with a jet engine or Warhol, with Instagram. Regarding Soviet nonconformist artist Leonid Lamm (1928–2017), however, we do not have to wonder. With a career spanning 70 years, technology caught up to his artistic vision and he became one of the most surprising and versatile artists in the history of Soviet nonconformist and contemporary Russian-American art. Nevermore: Leonid Lamm, Selected Works, on view through September 30 at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, examines his prolific career, which was stimulated by a lifelong inquiry into the multidimensional energy of space. More than 60 works on view represent three key periods: his early decades in the Soviet Union, the period following his move to the United States in the 1980s, and his incorporation of digital formats in more recent years. Free, public events that spotlight the exhibition include an evening reception on March 9 and Art After Hours: First Tuesdays on June 5. Details are available at www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu.