COLUMBIA, SC.- The Columbia Museum of Art announces the launch of Soviet Salvage: Imperial Debris, Revolutionary Reuse, and Russian Constructivism, a new book from CMA Curator Catherine Walworth, to be held on Wednesday, October 25, at 6:00 p.m. Coinciding with the centennial anniversary of the October Revolution, the launch includes an opening happy hour followed by a lecture from Walworth and subsequent book signing.

An engaging, multidisciplinary study of objects and their makers during the Soviet Union’s early years, Soviet Salvage explores how artists on the margins of the 1920s constructivist movement rejected “elitist” mediums and imagined a new world, knitting together avant-garde art, imperial castoffs, and everyday life.

“Constructivism deserves a closer historical study that broadens the discussion,” says Walworth. “There are names that hover like free radicals outside the border of its traditional history.”

Economic scarcity helped to both create and defeat Russian constructivism. The movement emerged from the compounded devastations of World War I, the Revolutions of 1917, and subsequent civil war. In 1921, a group of radical artists declared the death of painting and instead set out to redesign the objects of everyday life under socialism. Constructivist art was aimed toward factory production of functional, even persuasive objects. Its economical organization of material suited modernism’s spare geometric aesthetic.

Soviet Salvage assembles a new group of artists, working alongside Russian constructivists, with similar goals but different means. The artists that are its focus embody an alternative strain of the movement, one that used recycling and reappropriation as a tactical response to factory shortages. The resulting film, fashion, propaganda porcelain, and architecture tell a broader story of the unique political and economic pressures felt by their makers, reflect the chaotic and often contradictory zeitgeist of the decade, and redefine the concept of mass production.

“My intention is to showcase important artists on the fringe of constructivism and to change the shape of the discussion surrounding the movement at large,” says Walworth. “I wanted to insert constructivism back into its strained economic framework in ways that have real currency for today.”

Soviet Salvage illustrates how having less can lead to a creative range of new solutions that amount to more. Its open structure deepens knowledge of Soviet art and material culture and actively engages multiple fields in a fresh dialogue about the limits of art, design, and everyday life.