Opening Reception: Paste, Stick, Glue: Constructing Collage in Russia exhibition at the Amherst Center for Russian Culture

Opening reception Monday, March 4, 2019, from 5 to 6:30 pm

Russian Center Art Gallery, Amherst Center for Russian Culture (202 Webster Hall, Amherst College)

Director of Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Michael Kunichika’s welcome, followed by remarks by David Little, Director and Chief Curator of the Mead Art Museum, and curatorial remarks by Galina Mardilovich, Acting Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum

The word collage comes from the French verb coller, which means “to paste, stick, glue.” In practice, it is a technique that involves the physical layering of disparate elements. It originated as an art form when the Cubists and Futurists experimented with the surface of the picture plane in the early 1910s. Yet collage’s capacity for combining, fragmenting, and disrupting meaning has since rendered it an inexhaustible medium, emblematic of the fast-paced modern world.

Paste, Stick, Glue: Constructing Collage in Russia offers a historical overview of the many ways in which Russian and Soviet artists employed collage and the related techniques of film montage and photomontage. Drawn from the permanent collections of the Mead Art Museum and Amherst Center for Russian Culture, the exhibition features works by Liubov’ Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Sergei Eisenstein, Oscar Rabin, Oleg Kudryashov, and Alexander Kosolapov among others.

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with Constructing Collage, on view at the Mead Art Museum from March 5, 2019 to January 5, 2020.

Curated by Galina Mardilovich, Acting Curator of Russian and European Art at the Mead Art Museum.