Communism Through the Lens. Zimmerli Art Museum, USA
Zenta Dzividzinska’s photographs are included in the exhibition “Communism Through the Lens: Everyday Life Captured by Women Photographers in the Dodge Collection” at the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ, USA, from April 29 to October 17, 2021. The exhibition was open to in-person visitors from September 1 to October 17, 21.
The exhibition is curated by Maria Garth, the Graduate Curatorial Assistant (Dodge Fellow).
The online version of the exhibition is available here on the Zimmerli Art Museum’s website.
Exhibition installation views:
More about the exhibition:
According to the museum’s information,
“Spanning almost the entirety of the Soviet Union’s history from the 1920s through the 1990s, this exhibition of rarely-seen images explores themes of political art, documentary photography, and gender, offering a historical look at how women photographers interpreted life in the communist state.
[. . .] Despite the Soviet Union’s rhetoric of gender equality, women of both generations from all over the Soviet Union shared a range of personal and professional challenges in advancing their careers as photographers.
Bringing together over one hundred and thirty works from the Zimmerli’s Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, including photography books and journals, the majority of which are displayed for the first time, this is the first exhibition at the Zimmerli devoted to photography by women from the Soviet Union. It also presents a survey of approaches to photography to highlight for the first time the central role played by women in redefining photography’s social reach – and expressivity – as perhaps the quintessential modernist medium.”
Curator’s talk
Curator Maria Garth talks about photographs by Zenta Dzividzinska in a Zimmerli Art Museum talk, “Zimmerli Art After Hours: Women on View,” on March 2, 2021.
Roundtable talk at the opening
Virtual Exhibition Celebration, Thursday, April 29 - 5:00-6:30pm Eastern. The event features a curator-led overview of the exhibition by Maria Garth, followed by a roundtable discussion with guest speakers and a question-and-answer session with the audience. Guest speakers include Alise Tifentale, Ph.D., Riga Stradins University and Mark Svede, Ph.D., Ohio State University. The event is introduced and moderated by Julia Tulovsky, Ph.D., Curator at the Zimmerli Art Museum, and Jane Sharp, Ph.D., Research Curator at the Zimmerli Art Museum and Professor of Art History at Rutgers University.
