The Art of the Review - Episode 30 Art Criticism

In this episode, Yelena speaks with Natasha Kurchanova, an art historian specializing in the Russian avant-garde, a critic and curator of contemporary art about the connections and differences between art history and art criticism. Natasha received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. the City University of New York, where she studied modern art, photography, and film. Her dissertation was on Osip Brik, a Formalist theoretician, critic, and editor of the avant-garde journals Lef and Novyi Lef. She also published numerous articles for catalogues, anthologies on Russian art, and such journals as October, RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Ligeia. Kurchanova assisted in curating exhibitions in major museums in New York City, such as The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 at the Guggenheim Museum and Stenberg Brothers: Constructing a Revolution in Soviet Design at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2010, she curated her own exhibition of artists based in Brooklyn, Who’s Afraid of Ornament? at Nurture Art. Kurchanova has taught 20th-century and contemporary art in colleges and universities in the New York area. Currently, she is writing art reviews for Studio International and completing a book on Vladimir Tatlin.  

• Dreams or reality? Contemporary art in Moscow, summer 2014
• Art and politics/art or politics: the political quandary of Manifesta 10: The European Biennial of Contemporary Art, The State Herminage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia
• All the World's Futures: the 56th Venice Biennale
• Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s at the Ukrainian Museum, New York City
• Ralph Fasanella: Lest We Forget at the American Folk Art Museum, New York City
• The Mike Kelley Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, PS1, Long Island City, New York
• Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better at the Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting at the Guggenheim Museum, New York

And finally, I met Natasha through SHERA, the Society for Historians of East European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture, of which she is the current president.