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Zimmerli Exhibit Showcases Rarely Seen Large-Scale Nonconformist Art
Here is a detailed look of "The White Wave," a 1978 oil on canvas painting by Leonhard Lapin from the series "Signs."
Painting to Scale, which runs through Oct. 5, 2025, features 60 works by artists from Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Russia
Painting to Scale, the latest exhibition at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, boasts rarely shown, large-scale artwork from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union.
The exhibition runs from Wednesday, Nov. 13, through Oct. 5, 2025, in the lower Dodge wing at the Zimmerli, 71 Hamilton St., New Brunswick, N.J. Admission is free.
Featuring 60 works by artists from Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Russia, Painting to Scale “explores the constraints on access to materials that underpin narratives of nonconformism” in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, said Theresa Watson, the museum’s public relations and communications coordinator.
“Most works measure at least three feet on either side, while several extend beyond six feet, or are part of large series,” Watson said of the large-scale art.
The exhibition is organized by Jane Sharp, research curator for Soviet Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli and a professor in the Department of Art History within the School of Arts and Sciences.
“Painting to Scale was an exhibition I'd been working on for about a year, so this particular class was involved in critically examining its conceptual origins and spatial arrangement,” said Sharp, adding that she regularly teaches curatorial training and exhibition seminars, mostly to graduate students.
“The course requires each student to directly contribute to the final realization of the exhibition,” she said. “They generate their own research and writing to enhance public access to the exhibition.”
For Painting to Scale, Sharp enlisted the aid of several graduate students, who helped author many of the interpretive labels. One of those graduate students, Luke Dimitrov-Kuhl, a Hillsborough, N.J., resident is now in his second year of pursuing a master’s degree in art history and curatorial studies.
An opening reception on Wednesday, Nov. 13, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., is free and open to the public. The students will make brief presentations on the works they researched for the exhibition and lead tours of highlights in the show.
Sharp and Dimitrov-Kuhl discuss the exhibition.
Why involve your students? What do you hope they gain from this experience?
Sharp: I am committed to drawing students into the real needs of exhibition organization and the practical application of their research to the public sphere. This is particularly important for our graduate students who are enrolled at Rutgers because they seek career opportunities in the museum professions.
I also gain from their insights. Each student enriches the process of curating as we respond both to local needs and to the global dialogue that Dodge Collection exhibitions help shape.
Why did you get involved in this exhibition, and what did you do, specifically?
Dimitrov-Kuhl: The art history department regularly offers an exhibition seminar for graduate students. Not only is it a required course for multiple programs in the department, but it provides real-world experience to graduate students thinking about working in the museum sector, like myself. My classmates and I each chose one artwork and artist featured in Painting to Scale to research and write a caption for, while also assisting our professor.
What have you learned from your experience?
Dimitrov-Kuhl: Writing for the exhibit provided me with invaluable insight into the museological processes that happen behind the scenes at every museum. Additionally, it taught me how to problem-solve while curating an exhibit. Each museum exhibit, for instance, has to appropriately balance “text and image” – or caption and object – to successfully maintain a visitor’s interest in the gallery space and the curated topic.
This was particularly of concern for Painting to Scale, as the exhibit features a lot of artworks that are conceptual and obtuse at first glance, and the artists (who all come from the former U.S.S.R. and its satellite states) are unfamiliar to the average visitor. Thus, as a class, we decided that slightly longer captions were more appropriate for the exhibit to properly convey the artworks and artists to the audience.
What do you hope viewers take away from Painting to Scale?
Sharp: A goal for viewers is that they should become attuned to both the foreign and familiar in their encounters with artworks that, while produced in diverse cultures from Eastern Europe and Eurasia, demonstrate the stakes we all have in self-expression within our own communities.
Why should people come to the exhibition?
Dimitrov-Kuhl: I recommend the exhibit to anyone looking to learn more about Soviet Conceptualism in general, and to anyone interested in seeing “fugitive artworks” that were contrary to the socio-political forces around their inception.
All of the artists featured in Painting to Scale were producing works that the Soviet Union deemed contrary to its desired image of modernity, and many of them personally suffered due to this. This exhibition provides an important reminder that art is often the first place we look for personal liberation, that it expresses our hopes and dreams despite the turmoil around us, and that it acts as a catalyst for social or political change.
Why is art history important?
Sharp: Exposure to art history allows us to make sense of our own cultural experiences and activates access to our diverse heritages, linking past with present.
We live in a time when a deeper understanding of the sources for and networks underlying visual images has become critical to our evaluation of our own place in the present, our role in civil society, and contact with the global communities in which we participate.
Encounters with art make us aware of who and where we are, what we can take as "true" or "real" and how to question the truth claims that images shaping our perception of the world make.
