USF Visiting Scholar Dr. Maria Gough
Thu Nov 8, 7:00 PM - Thu Nov 8, 8:00 PM

Her primary area of research and teaching is early twentieth-century modern European art, with a particular emphasis on the Russian and Soviet avant-gardes. Her talk at USF is titled, “How to Make a Revolutionary Object: The Drawings of Gustavs Klucis.” It focuses on a corpus of presentation drawings for new media-driven structures for the revolutionary street: radio-orators, projection screens, advertising stands, slogan signs, and newspaper kiosks. Executed in the early 1920s by Gustavs Klucis (Gustav Klutsis), a Latvian immigrant to Moscow who would later enjoy renown as the leading Soviet photomonteur of the interwar period, these striking drawings have long captivated artists, architects, and designers due to their optical dynamism and graphic presence. From 2015-17, Dr. Gough was a scholarly consultant in the preparation of the Art Institute of Chicago’s centenary exhibition, “Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test,” which opened in October 2017, and also contributed two essays to its accompanying catalog edited by Matthew Witkovsky and Devin Fore. In 2017-18, she was the Mellon Visitor to the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago, leading workshops for their Chicago Object Study Initiative (COSI). Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2009, Dr. Gough was Associate Professor of Art History at Stanford University (2003-2009).