Lecture Exhibiting the Dodge Collection Through Time, by Jane A. Sharp
Lecture titled Exhibiting the Dodge Collection Through Time will be delivered by one of the curators Jane A. Sharp as part of the public programme of the exhibition Thinking Pictures.
The lecture will introduce the Dodge collection, focusing on Norton Dodge’s first visits to the USSR and addressing the increasing diversity of his interests in this art over time. It will highlight several exhibitions held at the Zimmerli Art Museum, including a recent one focusing on Moscow which led to a complete rethinking of the remarkable role played by conceptual art created in the Baltic states. The lecture will address the need to challenge Moscow-centric narratives in the exhibition space that historically have denied, among other reflexive responses, the work of major nonconforming artists, especially women.
Jane A. Sharp is a professor in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University. She also acts as Research Curator of the Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at the Zimmerli Art Museum. She teaches 20th and 21st century art history, focusing on avant-garde art created in the pre-revolutionary Russian empire and the former Soviet Union. Her areas of Dodge collection research include, aside from Russia, the Baltics, Georgia and Central Asia.
The exhibition Thinking Pictures in Kumu grew out of Jane Sharp’s exhibition Thinking Pictures: Moscow Conceptual Art from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection. Norton Dodge (1927–2011) was an American economist and Sovietologist who first travelled to the Soviet Union in 1955, when he was a student at Harvard University. During subsequent decades, Dodge, with the help of agents, collected a large number of unofficial art works from different Soviet republics, and smuggled them into the United States. Today, his collection of over 20,000 works is housed in the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.
Curators: Anu Allas, Liisa Kaljula and Jane Sharp