The Wayland Rudd Collection focuses on the representation of Africans and African Americans in Soviet graphic production and propaganda. The exhibition is part of a collaborative project conceived by the artist Yevgeniy Fiks that accesses the legacy of Wayland Rudd, the Collection’s namesake. Rudd was born in 1900 in Lincoln, Nebraska and died in 1952 in Moscow. He left the United States for the Soviet Union in 1932 to pursue his ambitions of becoming a stage actor whose career would be unhindered by racial discrimination. Containing poster art and postcards, the Collection reveals a complex entanglement of race and communism, while also serving to remind us of the conflicted legacies of Soviet propaganda and the geopolitics of racism, both domestic and international, in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Read more about the Wayland Rudd Collection in The Brooklyn Rail.

This exhibition and related events are co-sponsored by Wesleyan’s Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life; Center for the Humanities; Center for the Arts; African American Studies Department; History Department; and Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Department.

Image: Viktor Koretsky, Breaking Chains—That’s an Echo of Our Revolution!, 1968. Courtesy of the Collection of Yevgeniy Fiks