Museum of Russian Icons 2017 Fall Newsletter Volume 6

NEWS
from the
MUSEUM OF RUSSIAN ICONS
Fall 2017
MIGRATION + MEMORY
Jewish Artists of the Russian and Soviet Empires
from the Vladimir and Vera Torchilin Collection
October 12, 2017 - January 28, 2018
M
Lev Mezhberg | Still-life with flowers
and herring | 1974 | Oil on canvas,
laid on board
igration + Memory explores
the creative responses and
historical trajectories of
Jewish artists born, trained,
or active in the Russian or Soviet
empires in the 20th century. Geographic
mobility was an essential feature of
Jewish life in the region throughout the
century. While there were several waves
of Jewish immigration to Europe and
especially America in the late Imperial
era, as well as again in late Soviet times,
many also migrated eastward from the
Pale of Settlement into the cities of the
USSR. The opening of the exhibition
coincides closely with the centenary
of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
This Revolution and the one that
preceded it in February of the same year
transformed the landscape of economic,
educational, and professional options
for Russian Jewry, including artists, in
many positive ways, while also bringing
enormous displacement and violence.
The exhibition includes nearly 100
artworks by fifty different artists that
illuminate the aesthetic contributions
and socio-political experiences of Jews
within Imperial Russia and the Soviet
Union, as well as of Russian/Soviet Jews
in emigration in Europe and the United
States. These paintings, drawings,
prints, posters, illustrated books, and
decorative art objects, which span the
20th century, carry a complex legacy,
of both opportunity and suffering,
cooperation and hatred, inclusion and
alienation.
Organized by Boston’s Ballets Russes
Arts Initiative (BRAI), the show draws
on a multi-generational private
collection belonging to Vladimir and
Vera Torchilin, whose family’s path
reflects many aspects of the Russian-
Jewish experience. The show is curated
by BRAI’s Executive Director, Anna
Winestein, a Russian-Jewish-American
art historian and arts entrepreneur.
Visit ballets-russes.com for programs
in Boston that are related to this
exhibition.
Nina Aizenberg | Costume design
for a Soviet pioneer youth | c. 1930s |
Watercolor on paper
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