Artamonova’s dissertation examines the revolutionary aesthetics developed by Black artists engaged in socialist “friendship” with the Eastern Bloc from the 1950s to the 1970s. Her study of Second World–Third World artistic collaboration spans three decades and three continents, using a multilingual approach to uncover both top-down political structures and horizontal “contact zones” that fostered a cosmopolitan creative environment, enabling unexpected collaborations among Black artists in the Eastern Bloc. She argues that Black American and African artists developed a revolutionary aesthetic at the intersection of the geopolitical project of antiracist and anticolonial socialist “friendship” and the anti-formalist (meaning anti-modernist) project of postwar Socialist Realist art. Yet her inquiry reveals a central contradiction: while Eastern Bloc institutions sought to educate Black artists in the aesthetics of Socialist Realism, both socialism and Socialist Realism were in theoretical crisis and undergoing reform. This instability blurred distinctions between Socialist Realism and Western modernism, enabling Black artists to reshape both. In doing so, Artamonova’s project challenges dominant art-historical timelines of modernism that exclude African modernity and its entanglements with colonial legacies and liberation movements well into the 1980s.

The Art of Socialist ‘Friendship’ brings into dialogue Black American artists of the Civil Rights era and postcolonial sub-Saharan African artists, working across different media and geographies. It argues that these artists participated in a broader Soviet effort to construct a new figure: the Black socialist artist. Thus, the first part of the dissertation examines how Black American artists such as Charles White and Margaret Burroughs were celebrated in the Eastern Bloc as American progressive artists—and how this Americanness, commonly associated with Abstract Expressionism at the time, was denied to them at home.

Considering how McCarthyism and disillusionment with Soviet policies limited the USSR’s influence in the U.S., the second part of the dissertation focuses on how Soviet cultural internationalism shifted in the 1960s toward decolonizing Africa. It argues that the Soviets implemented political and cultural “friendship” on a state-wide scale—unlike the more individualized model found in the U.S.—to cultivate a new generation of Black artists and cultural bureaucrats who could champion socialist aesthetics. Focusing on visual production in painting, print, film, and photography, this section investigates how the aesthetics of socialist friendship were imagined, taught, and adapted across the African continent—while also attending to moments when Black artists rejected or reworked these models in search of alternative visual languages for revolutionary art.

Alexandra (Sasha) Artamonova is a scholar of modern and contemporary African American and African Diaspora art. She has worked in the Education Department at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, and as a research intern at Sprüth Magers gallery and SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. Her scholarship has been supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Chateaubriand PhD Fellowship Program in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Embassy of France in the United States.