The Time of a Great Dream: American Artists’ Gift to the Jewish Autonomous Region in the USSR exhibition is a historical example of peaceful collaboration and cultural exchange between the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. In the late 1920s, when the Soviet government decided to establish a new Jewish homeland in the Russian Far East, a number of American artists united to support this Jewish settlement in Birobidzhan, the new Promised Land.

They organized an exhibit that later was meant to become a gift to the Birobidzhan Museum. It is no surprise that in this time of Stalin’s repressions, the Museum never received it. The collection ended up at the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad. Many works were destroyed during the World War II, and today the museum has 74 items that are identified as parts of the Gift to Birobidzhan collection. The majority of them are engravings, and some of them are presented in this exhibition.

Works on Loan from: the Russian American Foundation in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation, The Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg, Russia