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2 books match the query 'Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum'
Beyond Memory
Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of ArtEdited by Diane Neumaier
Rutgers University Press, 2004
Photography possesses a powerful ability to bear witness, aid remembrance, shape, and even alter recollection. In Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, the general editor, Diane Neumaier, and twenty-three contributors offer a rigorous examination of the medium's role in late Soviet unofficial art. Focusing on the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, they explore artists' unusually inventive and resourceful uses of photography within a highly developed Soviet dissident culture.
During this time, lack of high-quality photographic materials, complimented by tremendous creative impulses, prompted artists to explore experimental photo-processes such as camera and darkroom manipulations, photomontage, and hand-coloring. Photography also took on a provocative array of forms including photo installation, artist-made samizdat (self-published) books, photo-realist painting, and many other surprising applications of the flexible medium.
Beyond Memory shows how innovative conceptual moves and approaches to form and content-echoes of Soviet society's coded communication and a Russian sense of absurdity-were common in the Soviet cultural underground. Collectively, the works in this anthology demonstrate how late-Soviet artists employed irony and invention to make positive use of difficult circumstances. In the process, the volume illuminates the multiple characters of photography itself and highlights the leading role that the medium has come to play in the international art world today.
Beyond Memory stands on its own as a rigorous examination of photography's place in late Soviet unofficial art, while also serving as a supplement to the traveling exhibition of the same title.
Collective Yearning
Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art MuseumAmber N. Wiley
Rutgers University Press, 2026
When Rutgers professor Amber N. Wiley began teaching her African American Art class in 2018, she and her students made a shocking discovery. While the university’s Zimmerli Art Museum had over seventy thousand artworks in its collection, only one of the pieces on display was by a Black American woman. The students, who came from a variety of majors and reflected the ethnic diversity of New Jersey itself, agreed something needed to be done to correct this imbalance. And so begins the story of the groundbreaking exhibition: Collective Yearning.
In this book, Wiley tells the story of how she and her student curators took a deep dive into the Zimmerli’s holdings to recover, catalog, and display its art by Black women. Along the way, contributors discuss the ethics of curation, the history of African American expressive traditions, and the institutional biases that erase or marginalize Black female perspectives. Richly illustrated with pieces from the exhibition, including little-seen work by such visionaries as Faith Ringgold, Renée Stout, and Kara Walker, Collective Yearning makes a powerful statement on the importance of showcasing Black women artists.