International Academic Conference: “Art and Dissent: The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union and Its Global Legacy”

This two-day international academic conference celebrated the launch of the newly developed website dedicated to the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. The event highlighted the global collaboration behind the project and explored the collection’s historical, cultural, and pedagogical significance.

The conference that took place at the museum on April 30 and May 1, 2026, featured panels and discussions with a cohort of scholars addressing the collection and digital initiative within broader debates concerning cultural memory, archival accessibility, and the global circulation of unofficial artistic practices.

Presentations by the Scholars of Baltic countries, moderated by Jane Sharp

Abstracts

Julija Fomina: Reframing Late Soviet Art: Curatorial Perspectives from Lithuania 

The presentation examines the shifting curatorial frameworks through which late Soviet art has been exhibited and interpreted in Lithuania from the late 1980s to the present. It begins by revisiting key exhibitions of the late 1980s and early 1990s curated by art critic Alfonsas Andriuškevičius and Raminta Jurėnaitė (director of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art Lithuania), which—through different strategies—sought to assert the cultural value of late Soviet artistic production and align it with contemporaneity. 

A pivotal moment in this historiography is the 1997 exhibition Quiet Modernism in Lithuania 1962–1982 (curated by Elona Lubytė), which constructed a narrative of “unofficial” art practices. By introducing the term “quiet modernism,” it established a lasting conceptual framework within Lithuanian art discourse, despite tensions such as the blurred boundary between official and unofficial spheres. 

The presentation then considers 21st-century exhibitions, including The Art of Protest (2020, curated by Arūnas Gelūnas), Elephants and Chameleons (2020, curated by Kristina Civinskienė), 1972: Breaking Through the Wall (2022, curated by Rasa Žukienė), and “Fairy Tale.” Childhood in Lithuania in the Late Soviet Era (2024–2025, curated by Auksė Petrulienė, Vaiva Mikelionytė, Karolina Jakaitė, Aidas Kulbokas). It argues that contemporary curatorial strategies both transform and reproduce earlier interpretative models, frequently privileging readings of artistic practice as forms of resistance and retrospectively framing artists as opponents of the Soviet system, while more contextually grounded exhibitions offer more nuanced understandings of the period.  

Liisa Kaljula: Periphery as Privilege. Conceptual Art from Soviet Estonia 

It is still a relatively well-kept secret that he Westernmost capitals of the Soviet Union—Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius—contributed to the conceptual turn that took place on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain in the 1970s, known hitherto as Moscow Conceptualism. Compared to the heavily controlled art life in Moscow, where artists were strictly divided between official and unofficial spheres, the Soviet Baltics enjoyed several freedoms and privileges that were unthinkable in the center of the Soviet universe. In Estonia, 1971 marked the year when the young artist Leonhard Lapin gave a speech at the State Art Institute where he criticized the handicraft mentality that prevailed at the institute and called his co-students to “think-paint, think-burn, and think-carve.” In the decade, several Estonian artists turned to seriality and cultural semiotics, starting to appropriate Soviet visual culture as an authoritative sign system and question the modernist notion of art as that of an auratic object produced by a subjective author. These works sooner or later ended up in public exhibitions, preventing the emigration wave of the younger generation of artists that devastated Moscow’s art scene in the second half of the 1970s.  

Maija Rudovska: She Wore Chanel No. 5. Positioning the Latvian Case within the Discourse of Nonconformism 

This presentation critically reassesses the concept of “nonconformism” and its limits within the study of Soviet-era art, taking the Latvian case as a critical site, which helps to question the analytical validity of nonconformism in art historical discourse. Developed in conjunction with the engagement for the Dodge Collection digital platform, the presentation engages directly with the collection’s logic while simultaneously exposing its conceptual frictions when applied to Baltic artists who practiced during Soviet era. 

Positioning itself within revisionist and post-revisionist art historiography, the presentation challenges the Cold War–inflected binary of “official” versus “unofficial” culture, reading it instead as a reductive epistemic grid that obscures the entanglement of artistic practice with Soviet institutional infrastructures. Drawing on recent decolonial and polycentric approaches to Soviet art history, it proposes to reframe nonconformism not as a stable oppositional identity, but as a relational and historically contingent construct.  

Focusing on the case studies of Džemma Skulme and Ojārs Ābols, the paper demonstrates how their artistic trajectories complicate dominant narratives of resistance. Their practices articulate a mode of “embedded negotiation,” in which aesthetic experimentation, institutional agency, and ideological proximity coexisted rather than functioned as mutually exclusive positions. By tracing their participation in cultural governance alongside their engagement with modernist idioms, the paper complicates the assumption that formal deviation necessarily indexes political dissent. 

By examining the intersection of artistic practice, institutional power, and political participation, this paper argues for a re-evaluation of nonconformism as a heuristic category in the Baltic context. It highlights the need to move beyond reductive labels and to acknowledge the ambivalent and context-dependent nature of artistic agency under late socialism. 

Presentations by the Scholars of Belarus and Ukraine, moderated by Sophio Kavtaradze

Abstracts

Tatsiana Zhurauliova: Autonomy in Action: Unofficial Art, Counter-Exhibitions, and the Production of Alternative Cultural Space in Late Soviet Belarus 

This presentation focuses on the alternative spaces and collective strategies developed by Belarusian artists in the 1980s and early 1990s to create and distribute their work outside of governmental control. It discusses three case studies: the 1987 group exhibition At the Kollectornaia Square, the 1988 action Conquest of Belarusian Deserts by the collective Belarusian Climate, and the 1992 student exhibition Lessons of Bad Art, organized by Igor Tishin and Natalya Zaloznaya. 

At the Kollectornaia Square marks a pivotal moment in Belarusian art history, indicating the first time that nonconformist practices were presented in a public space. It provoked widespread debate about the role of art in society and its capacity to shape political discourse. The exhibition also generated a conflict between state-supported institutions and unofficial art organizations, while exposing mechanisms used by the Soviet system to suppress free expression. The work of Belarusian Climate represents diverse strategies for producing and circulating art outside the official milieu. Their performances and actions took place in private settings—apartments, underground workshops, and “out-of-town escapades”—and addressed varied themes, including medium specificity, authorship, feminism, and ecocriticism. Lessons of Bad Art was a group exhibition featuring works by students who were expelled from the Belarusian State Academy of Arts and the Glebov School. These students were often expelled for challenging dominant aesthetic norms or openly criticizing institutional frameworks. Consequently, the exhibition provided an alternative space for displaying art and confronted institutional restrictions on artistic freedom in the early post-Soviet period. 

Alisa Lozhkina: Art History in Times of War: Collaborative Research on the Ukrainian Collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum 

The presentation discusses a research project focused on the Ukrainian collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum, carried out during the ongoing war in Ukraine. The project brought together key Ukrainian art historians to study artists in the collection and write new biographical entries based on current scholarship. It also led to a reassessment of the collection itself, revealing important gaps in representation, attribution, and historical context shaped by earlier collecting practices. Addressing these lacunae became a key part of the work and raised broader questions about canon formation and the visibility of Ukrainian art. The presentation reflects on the challenges of collaboration during wartime and considers the role of museums in supporting scholarship in times of crisis. 

Roundtable: Teaching in the Age of the Digital Museum, moderated by Jane Sharp

Participants:

Amy Bryzgel (Northeastern University), Emily Van Buskirk (Rutgers University), Yasha Klots (City University of New York), and Mark Lipovetsky (Columbia University)

Keynote presentation by Madina Tlostanova

Presentations by Scholars of Armenia and Georgia, moderated by Armen Yesayants

Abstracts

Sopio Gagoshidze, George Papashvili: Assemblage and Resistance in Georgian Nonconformist Art 

The first part of this presentation examines the works of Avto Varazi and Levan Magalashvili as two distinct responses to the constraints of socialist realism in Soviet Georgia during the 1960s and 1970s. While both artists developed nonconformist practices that rejected official aesthetic and ideological norms, they articulated dissent through fundamentally different strategies. Magalashvili’s assemblages, informed by his Manifesto of Object Art, present an explicit and confrontational critique of the Soviet regime. Through the use of mechanical fragments and discarded materials, his works expose the contradictions and violence embedded in the Soviet system. In contrast, Varazi’s practice operates through indirection and symbolism. Drawing on medieval Christian imagery, his assemblages construct a coded visual language that expresses resistance through spirituality and cultural memory, closely tied to Georgian identity. 

The second part of the presentation traces the emergence of object-based practices in Georgian nonconformist art, starting from Avto Varazi’s 1955 collage ARTS, where insertion operates as an illusionistic device, rooted in Cubist tradition. It follows the shift toward works in which found objects become autonomous and conceptually central. Focusing on their material and functional dimensions, the analysis emphasizes how everyday, often damaged objects of Soviet life carry autobiographical and societal meanings. Here, particular attention is given to Otar Chkhartishvili, whose practice foregrounds material degradation of the society as a direct register of lived experience, making the pressures on a struggle of industrial and personal, leading to the integral nature of artistic expression. 

Lilit Sargsyan: Armenian “National Modernism”: Between Aesthetics and Politics 

This presentation argues that Armenian nonconformist art of the Soviet period is best understood as a form of “national modernism,” in which resistance to the totalitarian canon was articulated primarily through formal innovation rather than overt political dissent. In the Armenian context, the assertion of national identity became the central mode of artistic opposition. 

Drawing on the Norton Dodge Collection and the curatorial framework of the exhibition Topographies of Dissent, the presentation demonstrates that the blurring of boundaries between official and unofficial art was a defining feature of Armenian artistic life. Unlike other Soviet contexts, Armenia did not develop a sustained tradition of explicitly critical practices such as sots art. Instead, modernism—grounded in the autonomy of form—emerged as the principal site of resistance to socialist realism. 

The presentation situates Armenian “national modernism” within a long historical and cultural trajectory, linking twentieth-century artistic practices to key elements of Armenian identity, including Christianity, the alphabet, manuscript culture, and architecture. It also examines the impact of the Armenian Genocide and the role of the diaspora in shaping a modernist visual language. Key figures discussed range from Arshile Gorky to artists of the 1960s–1980s. 

The analysis addresses the institutional and sociocultural conditions of Soviet Armenia, highlighting the coexistence of relative cultural liberalism and state control, as well as the role of the Museum of Modern Art in Yerevan. 

The presentation concludes by examining the emergence of contemporary art during perestroika, focusing on the Third Floor group and its shift toward global artistic discourse.

Presentations by Scholars of Central Asia and Russia, moderated by Christianna Bonin

Abstracts

Boris Chukhovich: Constants and Variables in the Alternative Art Scene of Uzbekistan in the 1960s–1980s 

The formats through which artists in Uzbekistan developed alternative practices were less diverse than those characterizing the Moscow and Leningrad art scenes. The Uzbek Republic did not witness the emergence of so-called “apartment exhibitions.” Exhibitions deviating from the mainstream were rare. Nor were there foreign embassies showing interest in nonconformist artistic experiments, or private collectors engaged in acquiring “forbidden art.” Nevertheless, alternative artistic practices did exist. Some were singular or short-lived, while others were sustained over relatively long periods within communities of like-minded practitioners. There were also instances of resistance to official art that outlasted the Soviet Union and continued into independent Uzbekistan, whose political regime remained, for a considerable time, more rigid than that of the Brezhnev era. My paper will offer a concise overview of these alternative forms. 

Valeria Ibraeva: Transavanguardia without the Avant-Garde: Artistic Processes in Kazakhstan in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century 

The focus of this presentation is an analysis of the emergence and development of critical thought in the art of Kazakhstan from the 1930s to the 1990s. Before the 1930s there was virtually no European-type art in the country: the ideas and structure of socialist realism were implemented through centralized control from Moscow, which pursued the task of creating the image of the “new Soviet Kazakh.” 

Artists who had been trained in the art institutes of Moscow and Leningrad returned to the branches of the Union of Artists of Kazakhstan established in 1934, carrying out the directive to produce art that was “socialist in form and national in content.” However, in the 1960s, in the context of the Khrushchev Thaw and the rise of national consciousness, a modernist movement emerged within the structures of the Union of Artists, that was grounded in a turn toward traditional applied art. 

Over the subsequent two decades, amid the expansion of the socio-political sphere, artists in Kazakhstan enthusiastically engaged with the formal devices of Western art—Cubism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Minimalism—transplanting them onto local artistic ground. Alongside ethnic motifs, which were perceived as signs of resistance to unification, critical undertones appeared in the official art of Kazakhstan, including references to the recent history of the GULAG and to the material deprivation and constraints of the “Soviet Kazakh” way of life.

Even landscape painting—traditionally considered the most escapist and apolitical genre—came to reflect themes of desolation and oppression. In the aftermath of the 1986 national uprising in Almaty, artists produced works that articulated collective trauma and historical rupture through heightened, often mythological imagery. Scholars of art from the Soviet national republics, including A. Solovyov, A. Tolstova, and A. Lozhkina, have linked this tendency to a broader cultural phenomenon characteristic of the late Soviet period, frequently associated with a late Soviet variant of what Achille Bonito Oliva described in 1979 as the Transavanguardia: a strategic return to myth, metaphor, and expressive intensity in response to ideological exhaustion and political repression. 

Nikolai Malinin: Issues in Studying Soviet Nonconformist Art from Russia 

This presentation analyzes a corpus of 350 texts dedicated to Russian nonconformist artists, assembled for the new website. A project of this scope has been undertaken for the first time, making it especially compelling to identify both overarching trends and the finer nuances within this extensive body of material. The presentation examines the interpretive strategies employed by Russian and international scholars, compare their approaches, and assess the historical perspective from which this art is being reconsidered today. 

That perspective—shaped above all by the trajectory of the Putin regime and, unquestionably, by the war unleashed against Ukraine—has once again rendered nonconformist art urgently relevant, positioning it anew as art of resistance. From this standpoint, it is particularly revealing to trace which artists remain “acceptable” within contemporary Russia and which have been relegated to museum storage or institutional obscurity. 

At the same time, contemporary Russian protest and anti-war art invite a compelling comparison with historical nonconformism: which lessons have been absorbed, and which patterns appear destined to repeat themselves? Another significant throughline recurring across these texts is the relationship between nonconformism and the historical avant-garde. Even the fate of their respective legacies increasingly appears strikingly similar, quite apart from questions of direct continuity. 

Finally, the ability to draw new comparisons—made possible by researchers’ access to the broadest fields of global modernist art—opens up further lines of inquiry. One example is Alexei Sundukov’s The Queue (Ochered’), which became a symbol of perestroika, and its visual and conceptual parallels with American precedents, particularly in the work of George Tooker.

Roundtable Perspectives on Decolonization, moderated by Christianna Bonnin