"Imagining the People: The Itinerants and Russian Realisms"

A guest lecture by Alla Rosenfeld, Research Consultant for the Russian and Eastern European Collection in the Merrill C. Berman Collection of Twentieth-Century Avant-Garde Art. She received her M.A. from the Academy of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Dr. Rosenfeld was previously Senior Curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum, and Director of the Zimmerli’s Russian Art Department. At the Zimmerli she organized exhibitions of Russian art and was an editor and contributor to numerous publications, including Moscow Conceptualism in Context (2011); Art of the Baltics: The Struggle for Freedom of Artistic Expression under the Soviets, 1945-1991 (2001); Defining Russian Graphic Arts, 1898–1934 (1999); and From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union (1995). Dr. Rosenfeld was later Vice President and Senior Specialist in the Russian Paintings Department at Sotheby’s in New York, and Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

Her lecture at Smith, “Imagining the People: The Itinerants and Russian Realisms,” will explore the “Itinerants” (Peredvizhniki), a nineteenth-century movement of Russian painters in dialogue with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and many other figures in Russian culture.