Art Exhibition to open in spring after delay over Ukrainian criticism

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A student exhibition about a Soviet school of freethinking advanced architects has been reinstated to a gallery in New York City after it was quickly scrapped last month following criticism from the Ukrainian diaspora.  

On January 25, the exhibition "Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde, 1920-1930," was delayed indefinitely by the Cooper Union private college, after it was due to open in the Houghton Gallery that day. The postponement came after a blistering article on Archinect, the largest online community of architects, students, and architecture fans. The article questioned the timing and location of the exhibition, near the Little Ukraine neighborhood.

Anna Bokov, a prize-winning architect and faculty member of the Cooper Union, who educated students on the Russian equivalent of the Bauhaus, prepared and curated the show about a century-old Moscow design school, Vkhutemas.

The show was about a collection of models reconstructed by Bokov’s students from surviving Vkhutemas designs, according to the New York Times reports.

The postponement was met with outrage by 763 scholars, students, and teachers who signed a protest letter slamming this "troubling instance of censorship and historical erasure."

The protesters said the article written by history of science professor at New York University, Peder Anker's, posted on Archinect, was "intellectually questionable" and "a chilling impingement on academic freedom and education."

This week, the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art reversed its stand and said the show would be back this spring, complemented by materials that will frame it within the "broader geopolitical context."

Anker said he had neither seen the show nor known what it included, according to the New York Times reports on Tuesday. He added that a casual lunch with Ukraine-associated neighbors was the source of the idea of his article. Scholars said in the letter that he was not an expert on Soviet art and architecture.  

NYT also reported that the author of the article knew Bokov personally but did not reveal this prior to the publication, in which he alleged her connections to the Kremlin.

The attack on the show’s curator was a sinister "smear campaign," Cathy Popkin, professor emerita of Russian at Columbia University, told NYT in an email.