CFP: Demons in Russian Icons, AATSEEL, Boston 2013

Boston, Massachusetts, USA, January 3 - 06, 2013
Deadline: Jul 1, 2012

Proposed panel on demons in Russian art for AATSEEL 2013. The panel will be chaired by Sally Pratt.

For the panel I am proposing to give a paper on the representation of demons focusing mainly on 17th c. Russian icons and illustrated manuscripts. Since icons are meant to make the invisible world visible, they help to shed light on contemporary interpretations of concepts such as evil.

Focus on provenance of a particular demon type is of interest as well as such topics as to the type of evil being represented with a particular subset of features such as color, etc

For further information please contact me at
rsmith@museumofrussianicons.org.

—Prof. Raoul Smith
Museum of Russian Icons
Clinton, MA 01510

JOB: Museum Program Asst, Museum of Russian Art, MN

The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in Minneapolis, the only museum of its kind in North America, is seeking a Program Assistant to support senior level staff with administrative and curatorial duties. This is a full-time, entry-level position.


POSITION DESCRIPTION
The Program Assistant will also support the Director of the Museum with day to day communications, including phone calls, emails, and correspondence with the Museum’s Board of Trustees. Other administrative duties include making travel arrangements for staff or visiting professionals, managing outgoing mail, ordering supplies, and other tasks as assigned. Will assist accounting department in reconciling expenses with budgets.


The Program Assistant will also support the Curator of the Museum with the management of the permanent collection, and in the development and implementation of the Museum’s exhibitions. Exhibition tasks include cataloguing, maintaining files, keeping track of loan requests and agreements, creating and updating object lists, as well as assisting with the preparation and proofreading of printed and online publications, catalogs, visitor guides, gallery introductions, wall texts, etc.


This is an excellent entry-level opportunity to gain experience in many aspects of museum operations.


QUALIFICATIONS
    Bachelor's degree. Preferably in art history, cultural studies, museum studies, art education, or related humanities discipline.
    Experience in editing/proofreading for publication.
    Excellent communication, writing, research, and organizational skills.
    Knowledge of Apple’s iWork suite of office software.
    Knowledge of Russian culture, history, and language a plus.



Start date
June 4, 2012
Application deadline
April 27, 2012
Education requirements
4-year degree


Please submit a cover letter and resume by Friday, April 27, 2012 to Misha Dashevsky at mdashevsky@tmora.org. No phone calls, please.

View the full listing here.
http://www.idealist.org/view/job/WN9WPGHsZc2D/

Russian Avant-gardes in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections

Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum
Special display of the Russian avant-garde works from the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza’s Permanent Collection and from the Carmen Thyssen Collection
Location: Rooms 42 and 43, ground floor

The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza has the most important collection of Soviet avant-garde art in Spain. Coinciding with the Contemporary Art Fair ARCO 2011 (Madrid, 16 to 20 February) with Russia as Invited Country, the Museum will be showing a new installation of its holdings of the so-called “Russian avant-gardes” in Rooms 42 and 43 on the ground floor of the Palacio de Villahermosa.


In the early decades of the 20th century a unique and unprecedented cultural renaissance took place in Imperial Russia (soon to become the Soviet Union). The Russian art world sprang to life with programmatic exhibitions, passionate manifestoes and theoretical declarations, accompanied by the rise of numerous different avant-garde movements. Some were based on outside influence, such as Cubo-Futurism and Rayonism, while others were authentic creations of the new, revolutionary Russia, such as Suprematism and Constructivism.


Visitors to the Museum will have the opportunity to learn about all these movements through a group of 35 works by artists of the stature of Chagall, Larionov, Goncharova, Stepanova, Popova, Kliun, Lissitzky and Kandinsky.

Russian Avant-gardes in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collections
From 15 February to 31 December 2011

http://www.museothyssen.org/pdf/exposiciones/vanguardias-rusas.pdf
http://www.museothyssen.org/en/thyssen/exposiciones_actuales

American collector of Soviet dissident art Norton Dodge dies at 84

Norton Dodge, an economics professor who in the course of research trips to study arcana like tractors and workforce demographics managed quietly to amass the world’s largest collection of nonconformist Soviet art, died on Nov. 5 in Washington. He was 84.The cause was multiple organ failure, his wife, Nancy, said. The couple had lived for many years at Cremona, a 978-acre estate in Mechanicsville, Md., whose 40-odd buildings long groaned with paintings, prints and other work made covertly from the 1950s to the 1980s.


That trove now forms the core of the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art From the Soviet Union, part of the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Eric Bulatov  'Danger' (1972-73), The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum

For “nonconformist” read “dissident,” and for “dissident” read “dangerous”: the term describes any art, including political, religious and Surrealist work, that did not hew to the narrow, state-sanctioned confines of Socialist Realism. During the Soviet era, the making of such art could result in the artist’s being ostracized, exiled, imprisoned or worse.


The Dodge Collection, which opened to the public in 1995, now comprises about 20,000 works. Artists represented there include some who are well known in the West today, among them the conceptual artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid.


Professor Dodge and the underground artists whose work he helped save are the subjects of a book, “The Ransom of Russian Art” (1994), by John McPhee. In his academic life, Professor Dodge was a scholar of Soviet economics who taught for many years at the University of Maryland. At his death he was emeritus professor of economics at St. Mary’s College of Maryland..

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/arts/norton-dodge-84-economics-professor-and-art-collector-dies.html


The Norton & Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union (1956-1986)
This is the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world. Comprising more than 17,000 works of art, this collection documents Soviet dissident art from the historical Cold War period (1956-1986)--from Khruschev’s cultural “thaw” to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. Soviet artists working in opposition to the government-prescribed style of Social Realism risked personal safety, imprisonment, and exile in their quest for individual expression
http://www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu/collections/?id=11