“The Wayland Rudd Collection” panel discussion

Winkleman Gallery is very pleased to present, in conjunction with “The Wayland Rudd Collection,” a project by Yevgeniy Fiks, an evening of indepth discussion on the issues raised by the exhibition: “Moscow to the Rescue: U.S. Racism, European Colonialism and the Soviet Promise.”For more information on the exhibition itself, please click here. Information on the panelists and their presentations: 1. Maxim Matusevich, “African American Travelers in Stalin’s Soviet Union” Maxim Matusevich is an Associate Professor of Global History at Seton Hall University where he also directs the Russian and East European Studies Program. He is the author of No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe: Ideology and Pragmatism in Nigerian-Soviet Relations (2003) and editor of Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of Encounters (2007). He has published and presented extensively on the history of Soviet-African relations during the Cold War as well as the history of race relations in the Soviet Union. 2. Raquel Greene, “Into Africa: The Soviet Union and Its Civilizing Mission as Depicted in 1920’s Soviet Children’s Literature” Raquel Greene is an Associate Professor of Russian at Grinnell College in Iowa where she teaches Russian Language and Literature as well as a course on the history and development of American Multicultural Children’s Literature. Her publications include articles on how questions of diversity might be addressed in the Russian language classroom and incorporated into a specific pedagogy. Her current research focuses on constructions of “Blackness” in early Soviet Children’s Literature.  3. Jonathan Shandell, “Before Rudd Was Russian: The Hidden History of a Trailblazing African American Actor” Jonathan Shandell is an Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts at Arcadia University in Glenside, PA. As a theatre historian, his scholarship focuses on issues of race and integration on the American stage in the mid-20th Century. A collection on inter-racial and cross-cultural collaboration on the American stage that he is co-editing, together with Dr. Cheryl Black of the University of Missouri, is forthcoming from Southern Illinois University Press.  4. Yelena Demikovsky, “Film ‘Black Russians: The Red Experience’” Yelena Demikovsky is founder of Red Palette Pictures. She is a documentary and narrative filmmaker with a broad theatre background in the United States and Russia. Demikovsky has directed award-winning documentaries such as “Unity,” “The Story Of Fenist ,” “Happy To Be So,” and “Vera. An Intimate Sketch.”