Important Note
Registration required. Please note that all attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 Policies and Guidelines. Columbia University is committed to protecting the health and safety of its community. To that end, all visiting alumni and guests must meet the University requirement of full vaccination status to attend in-person events. Vaccination cards may be checked upon entry to all venues.
Please join us for an artist reception for our exhibit The Wayland Rudd Collection by Yevgeniy Fiks.
“The Wayland Rudd Collection,” a conceptual project by the artist Yevgeniy Fiks, assembles an archive of visual works testifying to the Soviet Union’s engagement with race relations in the United States and decolonization efforts in Africa. Rudd, the Collection’s namesake, left America for the Soviet Union in the 1930s to pursue his ambitions of becoming a stage actor whose career would be unhindered by racial discrimination in America. The Collection contains poster art and postcards Fiks has selected as typifying the representation of Africans and African-Americans in Soviet graphic production and propaganda. It reveals a complex entanglement of race and communism while also serving to remind us of the conflicted legacies of Soviet propaganda and the geopolitics of racism, both domestic and international, in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.
