Margarita Tupitsyn

Margarita Tupitsyn is an independent curator, scholar, and critic. She received a Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1981–83, she was the curator of the Contemporary Russian Art Center of America in SoHo, New York, where she organized the first exhibitions of Moscow Conceptualism in the United States, among them Russian New Wave (1981). Her many exhibitions include Andrei Molodkin: Liquid Black (co-curator; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2012); Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism (Tate Modern, London, 2009); Against Kandinsky (Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, 2006); Klutsis and Kulagina: Photography and Montage after Constructivism (ICP, New York, 2004); Verbal Photography: Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov and the Moscow Archive of New Art (co curator; Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves, Porto, Portugal, 2004); Malevich and Film (Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 2002); Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York (Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, 2000); El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet (Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany, 1999); Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (co- curator; Queens Museum, New York, 1999); After Perestroika: Kitchenmaids or Stateswomen (Centre international d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1993); The Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915–1932 (co-curator; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992); Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (co-curator; ICA, Boston, 1990); The Green Show (Exit Art, New York, 1990); Sots Art (New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, 1986); and Apt Art: Moscow Vanguard in the ’80s (Washington Project for the Arts, Washington, D.C., 1984). Tupitsyn also created art events involving the Kazimir Passion group, at MoMA PS1 (1982) and the Kitchen (1984).

Tupitsyn has authored or contributed to many exhibition catalogues and anthologies, including the forthcoming Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922–1992 (Yale University Press); Exhibitions, in the series Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2014); Object:Photo: Modern Photographs; The Thomas Walther Collection, 1909–1949 (Museum of Modern Art, 2014); The Archive, in the series Documents of Contemporary Art (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2006); Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (Getty Research Institute, 2003); The Soviet Photograph (Yale University Press, 1996); Montage and Modern Life, 1919–1942 (MIT Press, 1994); and Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present (Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1989). She has written art criticism in Art in America, Artforum, Art Journal, and Flash Art. In 2000, Tupitsyn was a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. The following year, she received a research grant from the Société Kandinsky of the Centre Georges Pompidou, and in 2011 she was awarded a Creative Capital / Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant.