Across Life-Worlds Art Talk with Curator Vlad Smolkin

About this event

Join the Jewish Museum of Maryland for a curator-led engagement exploring the art highlighted in Across Life-Worlds: A Family History of Soviet Jewish Emigration. Curated by Victoria Smolkin and Vlad Smolkin, the exhibition places the stories of several Soviet Jewish families who came to Maryland in conversation with the global and national politics that enabled their emigration. Through presenting a selection of lived experiences, the exhibition explores how American and Soviet Jews, who began as distant strangers on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, came to see each other as family. At the event, explore the gallery and gain insight into aspects of the exhibition that both directly and indirectly incorporate art and artists. Learn about the ways that art functions to support and integrate the history of Soviet Jewish emigration presented. Hear how the curator’s background in the arts has shaped some of the curatorial decisions. About Across-Life Worlds In the late twentieth century, more than a million Soviet Jews left the Soviet Union—the largest ethnic emigration from the USSR, and the largest Jewish migration since the “Great Migration.” In the late 1980s and early 1990s Maryland became a major destination for this Soviet Jewish exodus. Across Life-Worlds follows the stories of these disparate branches of the Jewish family, tracing their converging fates during the Cold War and coming to a focus on their reunification in the U.S. The exhibition curators, themselves children of Soviet Jewish emigration, capture family stories in interviews, photos, home videos, and objects that reflect the years before their departure and after their arrival—a period that also marks the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. About the Featured Curator Vlad Smolkin was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and emigrated to the United States in 1989 with his parents and sister, co-curator Victoria Smolkin. He is an artist, curator, and founding director of CPM Gallery in Baltimore,…

Description from jewishmuseummd.org