Description:

Christina Kiaer, Professor of Art History, Northwestern University, will present two new books:

Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024)

Collective Threads: Anna Andreeva at the Red Rose Silk Factory (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2025), the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art-Costakis Collection, Thessaloniki.

Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka’s corporeal version of Socialist Realism in the 1920s and 1930s as an alternate experimental aesthetic.

Collective Threads follows this experimental aesthetic into a site of actual collective artistic labor: the all-female textile design collective at the Red Rose Silk Factory in Moscow during the post-war years, with a focus on the innovative textile design artist Anna Andreeva.

Clarifying the forms and aspirations of Soviet collectivity becomes ever more necessary in order to contest the Russian misuse of Soviet cultural history to defend its imperialist war against Ukraine in the name of the “Russian idea.”

Lunch will be provided.