Twenty photographs by Russian and Belarusian artists capture once-powerful symbols of the eroding Soviet State. These works came to the BMA from Brenda Edelson, who served as the Museum’s program director from 1973-85 and oversaw the BMA’s Downtown Gallery, the first satellite gallery in the country.

Many of the works date to the 1980s when the Soviet Union was increasingly opening up to the West. Highlights of the exhibition include Sergey Kozhemyakin’s Transformation of the Image (1990), a series of four gelatin silver prints, in which a view of a statue of Lenin is scratched and darkened until the monument is rendered unrecognizable. Other artists drew inspiration for their work from everyday experiences. Boris Savelev’s Girl in a Box (1991) depicts a woman sitting outside in a box-car like device that was hoisted up so she could paint the high gallery walls of The State Hermitage Museum, while Alexander Slyusarev’s Untitled (1980) is an abstract view of snowballs thrown against a dark, graffiti-covered wall.

Explore almost 4,000 gifts of art given to the BMA between 2006 – 2016.

Curated by

Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs Rena Hoisington