Brian James Baer

Yevgeniy Fiks

While the topic of queer sexuality in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union has been investigated for decades by scholars working in the fields of sociology, history, literary studies, and musicology, it has yet to be studied in any comprehensive or systematic way by those working in the visual arts. Queer(ing) Russian Art: Realism, Revolution, Performance is meant to address this lacuna by providing a platform for new scholarship that connects "Russian" art with queerness in a variety of ways. Situated at the intersection of Visual Studies and Queer Studies and working from different theoretical and disciplinary perspectives, the contributors expose and explore the queer imagery and sensibilities in works of visual art produced in pre-Soviet, Soviet and post-Soviet contexts and beneath the surface of conventional histories of Russian and Soviet art.

Realism, Revolution, Performance

Queer(ing) Russian Art

Wayland Rudd (1900-1952) was an African American actor who moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 and lived there until 1952. He appeared in numerous Soviet films and theatrical performances, and served as a model for paintings, drawings, and propaganda posters. Using Rudd?s personal story as a springboard, 'The Wayland Rudd Collection' presents Soviet images of Africans and African Americans produced between 1920 and 1980 alongside responses from contemporary artists, writers, and scholars. The book maps the complicated and often contradictory intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context, exposing the interweaving of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, and Communist ideals with practices of othering, exoticization, and racist stereotyping.00The book is edited by Russian-Amerian artist Yevgeniy Fiks, whose works explore the dialectic between Communism and ?the West? and build on historical research into Cold War narratives.

The Wayland Rudd Collection

Stamatina Gregory

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Edited by Yevgeniy Fiks and Stamatina Gregory. The Cold War lasted forty-six years, and--ostensibly--the West won. But where are the Cold War monuments? For nearly three decades, public signifiers of the Cold War, such as the Berlin Wall and Soviet monuments, have been framed in terms of destruction or kitsch. A monument created at the moment of its own demolition, the Wall encapsulated the continuing geopolitical imagination of the conflict as linear, binary, and terminal: the culmination of a now-historicized narrative of competing empires. But while the impact of half a century of sustained ideological conflict still reverberates through all forms of public and private experience--from Middle Eastern geographies of containment to the narrative structures of Hollywood to the suddenly reemerging (and still unfolding) conflict between Russia and the West--the Cold War has yet to be acknowledged through a public and monumental work of art. MONUMENT TO COLD WAR VICTORY is an art book about monumentality and the legacy of the Cold War. With texts by Yevgeniy Fiks and Stamatina Gregory, Boris Groys, Nina Khrushcheva, and Joes Segal and artists' projects by: Yuri Avvakumov, Aziz + Cucher, Kim Beck, Constantin Boym, Camel Collective (Anthony Graves and Carla-Herrera Prats), Sasha Chavchavadze, Christoph Draeger, Deyson Golbert, Francis Hunger, Szabolcs KissPál, The National Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service, Angelo Plessas, Lisi Raskin, Dread Scott, Dolsy & Kant Smith, Société Réaliste, Michael Wang.

Yevgeniy Fiks

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