Margarita Tupitsyn

Art Historian and Curator

Margarita Tupitsyn is an independent curator, scholar, and art critic. She received her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center of City University of New York. In 1981–83, she was the curator of Contemporary Russian Art Center of America in New York City, where she organized the first exhibitions of Moscow Conceptualism including Russian New Wave. Her many exhibitions include Sots Art and Apt Art, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Green Show, Exit Art, New York; Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (co-curated), ICA, Boston; The Great Utopia (co-curated), Guggenheim Museum, New York; After Perestroika: Kitchenmaids or Stateswomen, ICI, New York; Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (co-curated), Queens Museum, New York; El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York, Museum Folkwang, Essen; Malevich and Film, Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon; Klutsis and Kulagina: Photography and Montage After Constructivism, ICP, New York; Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and The Moscow Archive of New Art, Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto; Against Kandinsky, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism, Tate Modern, London; Andrei Molodkin: Liquid Black, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich. She is the author of many books and catalogues including Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present (Milan: Politi Editore, 1989), The Soviet Photograph (Yale University Press, 1996), and Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992 (Yale University Press, 2017). As an art critic and scholar, Tupitsyn has contributed to many exhibition catalogues and anthologies including Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel and the MIT Press) and The Museum of Modern Art’s Object-Photo. Modern Photographs 1909–1949: The Thomas Walther Collection. She has written art criticism for Flash Art, Artforum, Art Journal, and Art in America. In 2000, Tupitsyn was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and in 2011, she received a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2015, Tupitsyn curated the Russian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale and in 2018 curated Russian Dada, 1914-1924 at Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Contributions