Item #6494 The Wayland Rudd Collection. Yevgeniy Fiks.
The Wayland Rudd Collection
The Wayland Rudd Collection
The Wayland Rudd Collection

The Wayland Rudd Collection

New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021.

New Book.

Item #6494
ISBN: 9781946433275



Clothbound Hardcover. 264 pp.

The Wayland Rudd Collection presents artist Yevgeniy Fiks’s archive of Soviet media images of Africans and African Americans—from propaganda posters to postage stamps—mainly related to African liberation movements and civil rights struggles. Meditations, reflections, and research-based essays by scholars, poets, and artists address the complicated intersection of race and Communist internationalism, with particular focus on the Soviet Union’s critique of systemic racism in the US.

The project is named after Wayland Rudd (1900-1952), a Black American actor who moved to the Soviet Union in 1932 and appeared in many Soviet films and theatrical performances. The stories of Rudd and other expat African Americans in the Soviet Union are given special attention in the book.

Bringing together post-colonial and post-Soviet perspectives, the book maps the complicated and often contradictory intersection of race and Communism in the Soviet context, exposing the interweaving of internationalism, solidarity, humanism, and Communist ideals with practices of othering and exoticization.

Conceived and introduced by Yevgeniy Fiks; with a foreword by Lewis Gordon; and contributions by Kate Baldwin, Jonathan Flatley, Joy Gleason Carew, Raquel Greene, Douglas Kearney, Christina Kiaer, Maxim Matusevich, Vladimir Paperny, MaryLouise Patterson, Meredith Roman, Jonathan Shandell, Christopher Stackhouse, Marina Temkina.


Yevgeniy Fiks was born in Moscow in 1972 and has lived and worked in New York since 1994. As a “post-Soviet artist,” his works build on research into Cold War narratives to explore the dialectic between Communism and “the West,” addressing the Red and Lavender Scares during the McCarthy era, Communism in Modern Art, and African, African American, and Jewish diasporas in the Soviet Union. His artists books include Lenin For Your Library? (ante projects), Communist Guide to New York City (Common Books), Moscow (UDP), Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary (Cicada Press), and Monument to Cold War Victory (The Cooper Union). His work has been shown at the Biennale of Sydney, Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, and Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art and has received reviews in The New York Times, ARTFORUM, and other periodicals.

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