DJ Spooky Comes to The Zimmerli Next Month

Composer, multimedia artist and writer Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) presents the artist talk “Anthropocene Blues—The Peace Symphony” on Thursday, April 11, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Held in conjunction with the current exhibition The Body Implied: The Vanishing Figure in Soviet Art, this event is free and open to the public. Reservations are recommended. An audience Q&A and reception will follow the talk. Details are available at go.rutgers.edu/djspooky.

Miller composed Peace Symphony: 8 Stories, which debuted in 2015, following several weeks of interviewing some of the last survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He transformed the series of conversations into classical, hip hop, and electronic music compositions that he calls "acoustic portraits." In his multimedia presentation “Anthropocene Blues,” Miller combines clips of past Peace Symphony performances with other media to create a sound portrait of one of the most powerful moments of the 20th century.

“Miller's ‘Anthropocene Blues' provides a broader lens through which to view The Body Implied, which is composed of works that investigate the absent or abstracted body in artwork created during the Soviet period from 1970 to today,” said Stephanie Dvareckas, a Dodge Fellow at the Zimmerli, who organized the exhibition. “Miller's symphony explores the precipice—the nuclear attacks against Japan in 1945—that sparked a new era of technology and global ties that can't be understated.”

Established in 2002, the Dodge Fellowship supports emerging scholars in conducting primary research of the Zimmerli's Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. It allows the fellows to delve into topics and themes that have often been overlooked by history and art history. It also provides practical experience in developing exhibitions from an initial idea through installation, as well as all related activities that occur across the museum.

“Anthropocene Blues” aims to recontextualize works from the Dodge Collection, bringing to the fore issues of social and political entanglements that underscore the Cold War context.

The Body Implied: The Vanishing Figure in Soviet Art is on view at the Zimmerli through September 15, 2024. The exhibition is organized by Stephanie Dvareckas, Dodge Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University, in consultation with Jane A. Sharp, Ph.D., Research Curator for Soviet Nonconformist Art, and Julia Tulovsky, Ph.D., Curator of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art.

The exhibition and related activities are made possible by the leadership support of the Avenir Foundation Endowment Fund, with additional support from the Dodge Charitable Trust–Nancy Ruyle Dodge, Trustee.

The Zimmerli holds the largest collection in the world of Soviet nonconformist art, thanks to a remarkable 1991 donation from Norton and Nancy Dodge. Over 20,000 works by more than 1,000 artists reveal a culture that defied the strict, state-imposed conventions of Socialist Realism. This encyclopedic array of nonconformist art extends from about 1956 to 1991, from the beginning of Khrushchev's cultural “thaw” to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In addition to art made in Russia, the collection includes nonconformist art produced in the ethnically diverse Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum houses more than 60,000 works of art, with strengths in the Art of the Americas, Asian Art, European Art, Russian Art & Soviet Nonconformist Art, and Original Illustrations for Children's Literature. The permanent collections include works in all mediums, spanning from antiquity to the present day, providing representative examples of the museum's research and teaching message at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, which stands among America's highest-ranked, most diverse public research universities. Founded in 1766, as one of only nine colonial colleges established before the American Revolution, Rutgers is the nation's eighth-oldest institution of higher learning.

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