The Icon Museum and Study Center (The Icon Museum and Research Center in Clinton, Massachusetts, USA) opens the exhibition Icons: Old Believers and Their World — “Icons: Old Believers and their World”. This large—scale exhibition is dedicated to the unique artistic and spiritual heritage of the Old Believers, one of the most distinctive and enduring trends of Russian religious culture.
The exhibition will feature more than thirty works from the collection of the Russian icon Oleg Kushnirsky, complemented by rarely exhibited masterpieces from the museum’s collection. Together they create a deep and multifaceted narrative about the religious life and artistic traditions of the Old Believer communities. The project was curated by visiting specialist Dr. Justin Willson, associate professor of Medieval Art at Yale University, as well as museum curator Elliot Makin.
The exhibition reveals the phenomenon of the Old Believer icon as a phenomenon not only religious, but also cultural, social and aesthetic. Visitors will be able to see how, under conditions of pressure, isolation and persecution, a special visual culture was formed — saturated with distinctive symbols, distinguished by refined writing techniques and unique expressiveness of images. The icons presented at the exhibition are striking in their complexity of compositions and richness of details, testifying to the depth of religious thought, the uniqueness of the artistic language and the stability of the tradition, which was able to survive and develop in the face of historical upheavals.
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