"The Wayland Rudd Collection" reveiwed in The New York Times
The Wayland Rudd Collection’
Winkleman Gallery
621 West 27th Street
Through Feb. 15
Born
in Moscow in 1972 and now living in New York City, the conceptualist
Yevgeniy Fiks is a virtuoso in the art of recovering cultural memory. In
a 2013 solo
at Winkleman, “Homosexuality Is Stalin’s Atom Bomb to Destroy America,”
he connected dots between Cold War anti-communism and homophobia. The current group show
he has organized, “The Wayland Rudd Collection,” is based on the
little-documented history of the African-American presence in Russia.
The
black American actor Wayland Rudd emigrated to the Soviet Union in the
1930s hoping to find a tolerant social climate; there he had a stage and
film career until his death in 1952. While assembling an archive on
Rudd and other black expatriates to Russia, Mr. Fiks asked a dozen or so
contemporary artists to submit work in some way related to the subject,
and that’s what we see here.
Some
hew fairly closely to the historical subject. Suzanne Broughel
contributes a collage based on a photograph of Rudd, and Dread Scott
inserts images of black figures into Soviet revolutionary posters.
Natalia Pershina-Yakimanskaya (also known as Gluklya) creates a line of
Russian dresses incorporating African fabrics. Ivan Brazhkin, in short
video, tells the story of the Russian-Brazilian actor Tito Romalio
(1951-2010), who was killed in St. Petersburg in what could be interpreted as a racially motivated crime
Other
artists simply go with what it means to be a stranger in a strange
land. Joy Garnett documents the short, elusive, embattled life of Ismail
Ahmed Edham (1911-1940), an Egyptian writer (and distant relative of
the artist) who claimed to have been educated in Russia. Kara Lynch, in a
video and a series of handwritten books, records her time in Moscow
during an artist’s residency in 1994.
Drawings
by Zachary Fabri center on images of Angela Davis, a black power figure
politically harassed in the 1960s for her links to the Communist Party.
And music by the young artist-activist Nikolay Oleynikov,
performing with the Moscow riot-punk-folk band Arkadiy Kots, gives a
sense of rebel resistance in an ethnically and sexually intolerant
Russia today.
Mr.
Fiks’s show is full of information and gives interesting artists
(Alexey Katalkin, Jenny Polak, Michael Paul Britto) a chance to display
offbeat, issue-charged work. It’s scheduled to travel to First Floor
Gallery, Harare, Zimbabwe, this summer.
Image above: Dread Scott’s “Constitution of the USSR” (2014), in “The Wayland Rudd Collection,” a show at Winkleman Gallery. Courtesy the artist and Winkleman Gallery, New York
Image above: Dread Scott’s “Constitution of the USSR” (2014), in “The Wayland Rudd Collection,” a show at Winkleman Gallery. Courtesy the artist and Winkleman Gallery, New York
posted by Edward_ at
8:23 AM
1 Comments:
you could say that the abstract painting is subsidizing the more challenging forms of art. but you could also make the case that those forms are subsidizing the abstract work by providing the right context for those painters, whose work might look like corporate decoration elsewhere.
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