Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Russia

Founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich, Garage is the first philanthropic institution in Russia to create a comprehensive public mandate for contemporary art.

Providing opportunities for dialogue, as well as the production of new work and ideas, the Museum’s extensive program of exhibitions, events, education, research, and publishing reflects current developments in Russian and international culture. Central to these activities is the Museum’s collection, which is the only public archive in the country related to the development of Russian contemporary art from the 1950s through to the present.

On May 1, 2014, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture changed its name to Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, reflecting the co-founders’ commitment to providing long-term public access to living artists and art histories. On June 12, 2015, the Museum moved to its first permanent home in Gorky Park, in the heart of Moscow.

Garage Archive Collection plays a key role in the Museum’s activities. It incorporates a wide range of documents on the history of art in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The collection includes articles published in the Russian and international press since the 1970s; photographs from the 1960s to the 2010s (exhibitions, portraits of artists, and photographs of their works); videos of performances and other cultural events that took place in Moscow; artists’ writings from the 1960s to the 1990s; and other material, such as unpublished critical articles, artists’ bios, press releases, catalogues, and exhibition materials (1985–2020).

The archive continues to expand thanks to donations from artists, curators, gallerists, and art historians. Documents from personal archives, including home libraries and rare books, are a valuable source of information for researchers. Garage would like to thank Irina Aktuganova, Natalya Butovskaya, Evgeny Garkusha, Sergei Gordeev, Alyona Kirtsova, Naum Kleiman, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, Irina Meglinskaya, Viktor Misiano, Igor Osetsymsky, Viktor Pivovarov, Lena Popova, Anna Romanova, Aidan Salakhova, Natalya Samkova, Stanislav Savitsky, Elena Selina, Alexander Sokolov, Vasily and Stepan Subbotin Tatyana Volkova, and Arseny Zhilyaev for their invaluable contribution to Garage Archive Collection.