Dr. Jane A. Sharp

A professor in the Department of Art History, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, USA, Jane Sharp also acts as Research Curator of the Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union at the Zimmerli Art Museum. She teaches 20th and 21st century art history, focusing on art created in Russia and the former Soviet Union. Her publications include Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde, 1905-14 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won the 2007 Robert Motherwell Prize for a book on Modernism from the Dedalus Art Foundation. She is the recipient of numerous other awards and fellowships, including from the US National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation.

Since arriving at Rutgers in 1999, she has curated over 20 exhibitions and published extensively on Soviet era unofficial art. A recent book, Thinking Pictures: The Visual Field of Moscow Conceptualism, served as the catalogue for her exhibition drawn from the Dodge Collection held at the Zimmerli Art Museum (September 6-December 31, 2016); it received honorable mention for the Alfred H. Barr Award presented by the College Art Association. The exhibition, recurated with a focus on art from the Baltics with colleagues in Tallinn, took place at the National Museum of Estonian Art in Tallinn, in 2022. Dr. Sharp is currently completing a book on Thaw era abstraction in the former USSR.

Programming