Professor Jane Sharp (Rutgers University) will be giving her talk entitled "Abstraction and Ornament (Russian Kinetic Art of the 1960s)" on behalf of the DSEELC Graduate Forum Lecture Series. All graduate students are invited to attend, snacks will be provided.
In the 1960s, a group of Russian kinetic artists known as "Dvizhenie/Movement" sought to integrate "science", technology, and aesthetics to produce compelling affective experiences for viewers in public spaces. This presentation connects the ambiguities of their art with the anxious political environment (the end of Khrushchev's Thaw) in which they worked.
"The first work of purely Kinetic Art could be Naum Gabo’s mobile, Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave), created in 1919-1920 in Moscow. The artist’s goal with the piece was to try to advance movement and dynamic rhythm as its own aesthetic category.
Dr. Sharp is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and acts as Research Curator of the Dodge Collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum. In addition to teaching she has engaged students in curating and writing for exhibitions that explored abstract painting and Moscow conceptualist art in the Dodge Collection. While at Rutgers she has curated over ten exhibitions drawing from the Dodge Collection and recently curated the reinstallation of the Dodge Collection (2012). She is currently engaged in research for a book on abstract painting in Russia during and after the Thaw (1956-1991).
Her book, Russian Modernism Between East and West: Natalia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde, 1905-1914. (Cambridge University Press, 2006) was awarded the Robert Motherwell Prize from the Dedalus Foundation.
