Komar and Melamid: A Lesson in History

Julia Tulovsky is curator for Russian and Soviet nonconformist art at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. A specialist in Russian art, she holds a PhD from Moscow State University, and before coming to the Zimmerli, she worked at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Since 2001, she has served as executive director of the Malevich Society in New York, becoming a board member in 2015. She has been at the Zimmerli Art Museum since 2007 and has organized more than twenty exhibitions. She has published broadly on Russian avant-garde and contemporary art, in both Russian and English.

Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid were born in Moscow, USSR. Both graduated from Stroganoff Art Academy in 1967. In 1972, Komar and Melamid founded Sots Art - conceptual eclectic art based on cliches of the Soviet propaganda and the world’s art history. In 1974 their works, made in collaboration, were destroyed by the Soviet authorities during the disbanded “Bulldozer Exhibition” - the unofficial artists’ group show. In 1976 their works were smuggled out to New York and had a successful show at Ronald Feldman Gallery. Komar & Melamid have lived in New York since 1978 and participated in numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta, Kassel and Venice Biennale. In 2003, Komar and Melamid ended their collaboration and they have been working individually.

Olga Zaikina-Kondur is an art historian and curator, whose research focuses on modern and contemporary art. She earned a PhD in 2022 from Pennsylvania State University. In her dissertation Art in the Late Soviet Apartment, she examined the role of domestic materiality and related everyday practices in Moscow Conceptual art. Olga’s work has been published in the University of Toronto Art Journal, AAFiles, Hyperallergic blogazine, and elsewhere. Her curatorial experience includes conceptual art exhibitions and performative art reenactments.

Johnny Sagan studies Fine Art and Art History at Hunter College as a student in the Painting Department. He is an alumnus of the Hunter Painting Fellowship and the Mellon Public Humanities and Social Justice Scholars Program and in former incarnations in New York, worked as a curator and fashion functionary, including for his own gallery URSA NYC and his own fashion label Snowy Wilderness. He is currently working on two books, Hatching A Spirit: The Journey Of The Moscow Conceptualists and A Seismograph Of The Soul: Art As A Spiritual Practice.