Visiting Scholar Juliet Koss showcases her current research project on the symbolic value of architecture in the Soviet avant-garde.

Addressing the paintings, architectons, and drawings made by Kasimir Malevich in the 1920s and the representation of architecture and construction in Soviet culture of that decade more generally, with particular attention to material in the Photographic Collections of the CCA, and culminating in the journal USSR in Construction (1930-41), the project aims to demonstrate how a wide range of architectural representation, from the most figurative and theoretical to the most literal and concrete, emblematized the construction of the Soviet state.

Juliet Koss (B.A. Columbia University and Ph.D. MIT) is Associate Professor of Art History at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Her research centers on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European modernist art, architecture, and related fields, with an emphasis on Germany and Russia. She is the author of Modernism after Wagner (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press), which addresses a series of linked episodes in German aesthetic discourse and artistic practice from the revolution of 1848-49 to the playful figures of Bauhaus parties and performances in the 1920s and beyond and sets the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the notion of interdisciplinarity at the heart of modernism. Juliet Koss trained as a historian at Columbia University and MIT. She is Associate Professor of Art History at Scripps College in Claremont, California. Her research centers on late-19th- and early-20-century European modernist art and architecture, with an emphasis on Germany and Russia.

Juliet Koss was a Visiting Scholar at the CCA in 2008.