Museum of Contemporary Russian Art

The Museum of Contemporary Russian Art in Jersey City was founded by Alexander Glezer. It was opened on September 17, 1980, on the day of anniversary of Moscow bulldozer exhibition on September 15, 1974. For years before, Glezer founded a similar museum near Paris. Until 1990, those museums popularized the art of Russian nonconformists, such as Oscar Rabin, Vladimir Nemuhin, Boris Sveshnikov, Anatolij Zverev, Oleg Tselkov, Ernst Neizvestnyj, Erik Bulatov, Mihail Shemiakin, Vladimir Yakovlev, Eduard Shteinberg, Olga Vasilieva and other nonofficial artists. In 2005, The Museum of Contemporary Russian Art celebrated its 25th anniversary with three exhibitions in Jersey City, Moscow, and Paris. It is notable that the Museum created centers of Russian art. Russian poets and writers gave readings there. A symposium on “The Main Problems of Contemporary Russian Art” took place there as well. It gathered scholars from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Moreover, the Museum organized Mandelstam symposium at Hunter College in New York. Poets Evgeny Rein and Alexander Kushner, and Evgeny Sidorov, rector of Moscow Literature Institute and literary critic, participated at the event. Hunter College also hosted Alexander Solzhenitsyn symposium. The Museum in Paris organized a symposium dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov and a symposium on so called “other literature.” During the years of their existence, the two museums hosted more than 400 exhibitions in their showrooms, as well as in the museums of Russia (Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Tretiakov Gallery, etc.), Ukraine (Harkov, Zaporozhje, Odessa), England (Institute of Modern Arts), France (Shartr, Tur, Laval), Western Germany (Düsseldorf) and exhibition halls and galleries of the U.S. France, Western Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Canada, Russia, and Ukraine.