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Gallery Talk: Christina Kiaer & Maria Gough

Christina Kiaer and Maria Gough

A provocative gallery conversation with Christina Kiaer, Revolution Every Day co-curator, and Maria Gough, Joseph Pullitzer, Jr. Professor of Modern Art at Harvard University, and renowned expert on Russian avant-garde art.

Focusing on a few key graphic works produced in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 30s, the presenters will address questions of artistic agency under Stalin, as artists used both avant-garde and realist techniques to promote a new ever day life under socialism.

FREE, open to all. 


About the Presenters

Christina Kiaer is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, where she teaches twentieth-century art, specializing in Russian and Soviet art, the politics of realism and the avant-garde, Comintern aesthetics, the visual culture of anti-racism, and feminist theory. Her first book Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press) was published in 2005, and was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. That year she also published an interdisciplinary volume of essays on Soviet cultural history, co-edited with Eric Naiman, on Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia: Taking the Revolution Inside (Indiana University Press). Her book Collective Body: The Lyrical Prospects of Socialist Realism is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. She is currently at work on a new project, An Aesthetics of Anti-racism: African Americans in Soviet Visual Culture. She is a co-curator of the Smart Museum's exhibition Revolution Every Day and a consultant and a member of the catalog collective for the exhibition Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test at the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she served as consultant curator on the 2009 exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism at the Tate Modern Museum, London, and as a special advisor to the 2011 exhibition Aleksandr Deineka: An Avant-Garde for the Proletariat at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid. She has held postdoctoral research grants from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the American Philosophical Society, the Social Science Research Council, and the J. Paul Getty Foundation, among others. Professor Kiaer spent the academic year 2015-2016 as a Faculty Fellow at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University.

Maria Gough is Joseph Pulitzer Jr., Professor of Modern Art in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, where her research and teaching focuses primarily on the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes, Weimar aesthetics, and French modernism, with an occasional dip into contemporary art. Her major areas of interest include abstraction, drawing, photography, print media, exhibition design, para-architecture, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.  Among her most recent texts are: “You Can Draw With Whatever You Like” in The Cubism Seminars (CASVA, 2017); “The Newsreader,” in On Kawara—Silence (Guggenheim Museum, 2015);  “Model Exhibition,” October (Fall 2014), “Architecture as Such,” in Malevich (Tate Modern, 2014); and “Drawing between Reportage and Memory: Diego Rivera’s Moscow Sketchbook,” October (Fall 2013). A recipient of fellowships from CASVA (1992-95), Getty Foundation (2000-01), Clark Art Institute (2001), Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2011-12), Guggenheim Foundation (2015-16), and Graham Foundation (2017-18), Gough is currently completing two book manuscripts, one on the drawings of Gustavs Klucis (Inventory Press, 2018), and another on the photographic practices of foreign travelers in the Soviet Union during the 1930s (University of Chicago Press, 2019).