Washington D.C., January 20, 2016 Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens is pleased to announce the acquisition of the personal library of professor Anthony Cross, historian and scholar of 18th-century Russian studies and professor of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge from 1985 to 2004. He is internationally known for his work on 18th-century Russia and Anglo-Russian cultural relations. Professor Cross has written and edited 25 books and has published over 400 articles, notes and reviews. Through his academic life, Professor Cross received several distinguishing accolades: In 1989, he was elected to the British Academy; he was invited to join the Russian Academy of the Humanities in 1996. In 2010 he received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of Russian Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Pushkin House).
The collection, built over the course of 60 years, includes 2,330 books in Russian, English, French and German, on literature, art, architecture, drama, history, freemasonry, history of science, geography, bibliography, and St. Petersburg; hundreds of offprints; and several linear feet of Cross’ personal files on individual authors and subjects.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, SEE FULL POST

The Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University offers Dodge Graduate Assistantships to doctoral candidates admitted to the Department of Art History who are committed to research on unofficial art of the former Soviet Union. Established in 2002 with a generous endowment from the Avenir Foundation in honor of Norton T. and Nancy Dodge, this assistantship program provides full tuition, fees, and health benefits, as well as an annual stipend for living expenses, to graduate students (known as Dodge Fellows). Travel funds for research and language study abroad, as well as for participation in conferences, are also available to Dodge Fellows by formal application.

Dodge Fellows who enter Rutgers without a master’s degree are eligible for five years of assistantship funding. During the course of the first three years, students are obliged to work 15 hours a week in the Zimmerli’s Russian and Soviet curatorial offices; the subsequent two years support dissertation research and writing without any work obligation. Those who enter with a master’s degree are awarded four years of funding, reflecting a shortened period of coursework required for the doctoral degree.

Work at the Zimmerli Art Museum is supervised by Dr. Jane A. Sharp, Associate Professor of Art History and Research Curator for the Dodge Collection, and Dr. Julia Tulovsky, Associate Curator for Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art, with the assistance of other museum staff. The fellows perform a variety of tasks such as curatorial assistance in exhibition and catalogue production as well as administration and collection management. During the third year Dodge Fellows are given the opportunity to curate their own exhibition from the Zimmerli’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection.

Please refer to this link for more information: http://arthistory.rutgers.edu.

Application and Selection Process: Dodge Assistantships are awarded by the Department of Art History in consultation with the Zimmerli’s Director and staff to incoming graduate students. For information about the Dodge Assistantships, contact Professor Jane Sharp.

Member and current President of SHERA Natasha Kurchanova has recently published interviews in Studio International with two Russian-American artists who are living and working in the New York. Her interview with Yevgeniy Fiks can be found here, and her interview with Emilia Kabakov can be found here.

http://www.acfny.org/media/press-images-texts/normalities/

The Austrian Cultural Forum New York is pleased to present Normalities, a show starring artists from the Western Balkan region (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia), Croatia, as well as from Austria and the United States. Artists include Flaka Haliti, Armando Lulaj, Damir Očko, and Irena Lagator Pejović, whose works were featured at the 55th and 56th Venice Biennials in 2013 and 2015, respectively.

For philosopher Slavoj Žižek the very name “Balkans” is almost synonymous with “otherness” and deliberately used to distinguish oneself from one’s very neighbor. In the past century, the region was a laboratory of extraordinary political circumstances, and still is by all means a place in constant transition. In recent times, Southeastern Europe has gone through a massive transformation in an economical as well as political sense. Migration has made Vienna the fastest growing European capital, the city with the third-largest Serbian population, and home to many emerging artists. The integration of the Western Balkan countries into the European Union is a clear goal, but still an ongoing process. Apart from these political aspects of normalization, the concept of “normality” becomes all the more attractive within various different theoretical frameworks and disciplines, from philosophy and psychology to sociology and, of course, the arts.

The works showcased in Normalities go beyond art of a post-conflict society. They range from print, collage, and sculpture to photography and video, support the approach of constantly questioning normality. Some artistic positions deal with overcoming the past: Cvijanović, Lulaj and Hasanović’s artworks deal directly with history as they choose an event or person of great historical importance and manage to create a new reading by shifting symbols. Others address the friction between private and political. In his series of staged portraits Muja, for example, depicts aspects of national identification. Knebl uses her own body as a projection surface in her sculpture dealing with hate speech. Haliti, Jureša and Stanojkoviќ focus on sociological and cultural topics such as de-masking of mechanisms of male bonding, questions of migration or the death of cinemas—dimensions in which issues of normality pervade through and guide society. Prvački’s video At the Tips of Your Fingertips is a performance which literally shows the “laundering” of one dollar bills. Lagator Pejović, Brown and Dražić’s pieces could be described as investigating modes of perception, but all of them also engage with the materiality of the artworks and associations evolving out of a certain choice of material or format. Von Gabain’s work—a plaster cast of a Starbucks cup—can be seen as ironic comment on industrial norms. The analysis of architecture, especially driven by an interest in gender topics, is part of Sagadin’s installation. In TK, Očko investigates human shivering as a mechanism of resistance in a time of global insecurity, anxiety, and fear.

http://harriman.columbia.edu/event/antique-art-contemporary-culture

Liudmila Davydova will present a lecture “Antique Art in Contemporary Culture,” which will take place on Wednesday, January 27 at noon at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, 12th floor, Room 1219, NY, NY 10027.

Liudmila Ivanovna Davydova is Curator of Greek Sculpture at the Hermitage where she lectures frequently on the history of the museum and its collection, including the holdings of the Department of Classical Antiquity. She is also a Professor at the I. Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture of the Academy of Fine Arts where she teaches ancient art. This year, she proposed a course “Live Antiquity” for the Youth Educational Center of the Hermitage. In this course, she uncovers relevant aspects of the art of Ancient Greece to our lives today.

Professor Davydova’s lecture “Antique Art in Contemporary Culture,” is designed to convey to listeners the sense of contemporaneity of classical heritage. This lecture will demonstrate the extent to which contemporary artists integrate achievements of ancient sculptors, painters, and architects into their work and the fabric of our lives. It will be illustrated by individual works as well as recent exhibitions that took place in Russia and in Europe.

Please send your proposals to shera.artarchitecture@gmail.com by January 20, 2016.

SHERA is looking for volunteers to chair or co-chair a 2.5- hour SHERA-sponsored panel for CAA 2017 and to come up with a broadly-formulated theme that explicitly appeals to the full range of our members’ interests, both geographical and chronological. Since our resurgence 2 years ago, we have been successful in soliciting excellent proposals from our members, both for 1.5 and 2.5-hour sessions. As a reminder and an inspiration, I am sending you a list of SHERA-sponsored sessions we’ve organized so far:

2014
1.5-hour session: “Decentering Art of the Former East.” Co-chaired by Kristin Romberg and Masha Chlenova;

2015
1.5-hour session: “Infiltrating the Pedagogical Canon.” Chaired by Marie Gasper-Hulvat;
2.5-hour double session: “Reconsidering Art and Politics: Towards New Narratives of Russian and Eastern European Art.” Chaired by Maria Taroutina and Galina Mardilovich;

2016 1.5-hour session: “Collecting, Curating, Canonizing, Critiquing: The Institutionalization of Eastern European Art.” Chaired by Ksenia Nouril;
2.5-hour double session: “Exploring Native Traditions in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia.” Chaired by Alison Hilton.

We will send out calls for short sessions in April of 2016, but meanwhile we are looking forward to receiving your proposals for the 2.5-hour slot.

Once the SHERA officers make a selection, they will write a letter of support to the CAA conference committee, so that the proposed session has a better chance of being accepted. As can seen from our record, so far this tactic has worked. If it does not, it will be possible to resubmit the proposal next year or during our short-session call in April.

SHERA member Myroslava Mudrak and Tentiana Rudenko have been awarded the 2016 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Prize for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions for their show at the Ukrainian Museum, Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s. The College Art Association will confer the award at its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, February 3, 5:30-7:00 pm in the Marriott Ballroom of the conference hotel (The Washington Marriott Wardman Park). Mudrak is Professor Emerita in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University and Rudenko is Chief Curator of the Museum of Theater, Music, and Cinema Arts of Ukraine in Kyiv.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT RUSSIAN ART

WHEN: Sunday, 20 December 2015 at 4pm
WHERE: The Prince Theatre – part of the Producers’ Club, Upstairs at 358 West 44th Street New York, NY, 10036

Causa Artium is kicking off a new initiative – a new ongoing series of podcasts about Russian Art. It’s about “WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT RUSSIAN ART” – as viewers, as scholars and critics.

• What is the conversation we usually get …and what parts of it are not really the point?
• More centrally: what are the most important things about Russian art – of any period, any movement, any artist – that we really need to be focusing on, but aren’t ……yet?

On Sunday 20 December, we gather to hear the initial experts speak to this question – their talks will become the first podcasts in the new program. Then they’ll join forces in a round-table discussion of the issues raised in the talks – and more. Come and listen, ask your own questions, meet the experts!

Talks will be in Russian and in English, at the speaker’s election.

Participants will include:

• Aleksandra Shatskikh, possibly the world’s premiere expert on Malevich and early 20th-century Russian avant-garde art.
• Natalia Kolodzei, art historian, curator, director of one of the world’s greatest collections of post-war Russian art.
• Elena Sarni, artist and curator
• Margaret Samu, art historian and scholar, teaches at New York University, the Parsons School of Design, Yeshiva University, the New School, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

http://knockdown.center/event/private-nationalism/

Video screening and panel discussion Co-presented by Edit András, Ilona Németh, Viera Levitt, the Clakula-Gauthier Art production and Magdalena Moskalewicz

Including the work of Tibor Horváth, László Nagyvári Nosek, Csaba Nemes, Bálint Szombathy (Hungary) /András Cséfalvay, Matej Kaminský, Ilona Németh, Martin Piaček, Tomáš Rafa, Mark Ther, Matej Vakula (Czech Republic and Slovakia /C.T Jasper and Joanna Malinowska (Polish Pavilion of the Venice Biennial, 2015)

Private Nationalism Project initiated by Approach Art Association, Pécs (project leader (Rita Varga) took place as an exhibition series at arts venues throughout Central Europe and beyond. Using visual artworks, discussions, and publications, the project directed attention to the urgency of totalizing nationalist developments of the former Soviet bloc by shedding light on overlooked issues of the daily life, and the subtle processes by which ideologies infiltrate and are absorbed into the citizenry.

Knockdown Center hosts a screening and discussion generated from this expansive project that involved the work of many curators and artists as it traveled and changed shape in each city: Budapest, Bratislava, Dresden, Krakow, Košice, Prague.

The presentation is divided into 3 parts focusing on Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. Each screening section will be followed by a 15min discussion.

Hungarian part will be presented by Edit András (Hungary/USA, art historian)
Czech and Slovak part will be presented by Ilona Németh (Slovakia, artist), Matej Vakula (Slovakia/USA, artist) and Viera Levitt (Slovakia/USA, UMass Dartmouth Gallery Director)
Polish part will be presented by Magdalena Moskalewicz (Poland/USA, art historian and curator)
Supported by Trust of Mutual Understanding, NY

Applications are due by January 15, 2016

The Harriman Institute postdoctoral fellowships allow junior scholars to spend a specified term (from one semester to two years, depending on the type of fellowship) in residence at Columbia University in New York. All fellows are assigned a faculty mentor. Postdoctoral fellows are expected to concentrate on their own research and writing; to give a brownbag seminar on their research, and to post a related Working Paper on the Institute’s website; and to be active participants in the Institute’s scholarly community and events. All postdoctoral fellows receive university IDs that provide access to the full range of resources within the Columbia library system, and the Institute makes every effort to provide desk space for all postdoctoral fellows. The Institute provides funds to sponsor workshops, conferences, and special events planned by fellows around their particular interests.

The Harriman Institute has three types of postdoctoral fellowships: general (three positions, two years), the INTERACT Central Asia (one position, one year), Serbian Studies (one position, one year); and Ukrainian Studies (one position, one semester). Candidates should indicate which program(s) they are applying for in their cover letters.

Eligibility for the 2016 competition is restricted to those who have received the Ph.D. between July 31, 2013 and June 30, 2016 and who do not hold a tenure-track position. All fellows must successfully defend and deposit their dissertations prior to the commencement of the fellowship.

Information on each program and application details: http://harriman.columbia.edu/visitor-programs/fellows