The Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship Fund has awarded its 2018–19 fellowships to Alexander Skidan in poetry, and to Vladimir Logutov in the visual arts. Through the Brodsky Fund’s partnerships with the American Academy in Rome and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Skidan will spend fall 2018 in Rome and Venice, while Logutov will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome for three months in early 2019. The Brodsky Fellowships, part of AAR’s program of Affiliated Fellowships, will allow these two talented artists to study classical and contemporary Italian culture, develop their own projects, and interact with artists and scholars from other parts of the world.
Born in Samara in 1980, Vladimir Logutov is an artist who lives and works in Moscow. He studied painting at Samara Art College and pedagogics and fine art at Samara Pedagogical University. Logutov works in video, sculpture, painting, and drawing and is a cofounder of an art group called Laboratory. He has had solo exhibitions in the Russian cities of Moscow, Perm, Nizhny Novgorod, Krasnoyarsk, Samara, and Voronezh, as well as in Stuttgart, Germany, and Birmingham, England. Logutov participated in video art festivals at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and 2013 and at the Gaungzhou Triennial in 2014.
Alexandr Skidan, born in Leningrad in 1965, is a poet, critic, essayist, and translator based in Saint Petersburg. He attended the Free University (1989–92), while working as a stoker in a boiler house (1985–2002). Skidan’s poetry collections include Delirium (1993), In the Re-Reading (1998), Red Shifting (2005), Dissolution (2010), and Membra disjecta (2015). He is also an author of four books of essays: Critical Mass (1995), The Resistance to/of Poetry (2001), Sum of Poetics (2013), and Theses toward Politicization of Art and Other Texts (2014). Skidan has translated contemporary American poetry and fiction into Russiаn, as well as theoretical works by Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Jean-Luc Nancy, Paolo Virno, and Gerald Raunig. Among his honors are the Turgenev Award for short prose, the Andrey Bely Prize in poetry, and the Award “Most” (“Bridge”) for the best critical text on poetry.
Born in Leningrad in 1940, the poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky immigrated to the United States in 1972, becoming a citizen five years later. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987 for “all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity.” Brodsky wrote in both Russian and English. Of himself, he said, “I’m Jewish; a Russian poet, an English essayist—and, of course, an American citizen.” Brodsky visited Rome many times as a guest, fellow, and board member of the American Academy in Rome. In 1995, shortly before his death, he proposed to the Mayor of Rome the creation of a Russian Academy in Rome, modeled on the American Academy. The Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund came into existence after Brodsky’s death in 1996, as a way of honoring that vision. Its mission is to support Russian writers and visual artists by offering them the opportunity to live and work as part of a stimulating international cultural community, most often at AAR. To date, the fund has awarded more than forty fellowships to poets and visual artists.