An exhibition at the Cooper Union in New York exploring the legacy of Vkhutemas, a short-lived interdisciplinary Moscow design school that was ultimately dissolved in 1930 by Joseph Stalin just ten years into its existence, is back on after its planned late January opening was delayed—to considerable controversy—in response to public outcry citing insensitivity of the staging amid Russia’s ongoing invasion of neighboring Ukraine. The Cooper Union’s campus in Manhattan’s East Village directly neighbors an ethnic enclave known as Little Ukraine, which serves as the cultural heart of New York City’s Ukrainian community and is home to a significant number of Ukrainian American residents and longstanding Ukrainian American-owned businesses.
Following a three-month period in which exhibition organizers worked to “further situate the exhibition within an expanded study of historical and political context,”Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism, 1920–1930, curated by Anna Bokov, assistant professor adjunct at the Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and author of the 2021 book Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930, will now open Tuesday, April 25 at the Arthur A. Houghton Gallery at Cooper Union’s Foundation Building on East 7th Street. The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, will be on view for a short period, closing on May 5.
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