The history of avant-garde museology begins after the October Revolution, when the Russian champions of new art proposed the establishment of a network of Museums of Artistic Culture. Not much later, a group of New-York-based modernists and Dadaists started the Société Anonyme, a collective that sought to establish the first American museum of modern art. The successive chapters of this story were written by the Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky, who designed the Kabinett der Abstrakten at the Hanover Provinzialmuseum, and by the avant-garde a.r. group, whose efforts began the International Collection of Modern Art at the Łódź museum now known as the Muzeum Sztuki.
CAST YOUR MIND, if you can bear it, back to the disorienting first year of the pandemic. Late in the summer of 2020, a crackling moment of possibility broke through the leaden mood, albeit briefly, when all of a sudden it seemed as though one extraordinary woman might be poised to save not only the United States Postal Service but the practice of voting and democracy itself. Ruth Asawa’s commemorative stamps launched in San Francisco on August 13. In place of in-person events, a handful of online festivities and formalities heralded their arrival. Often described as an artist’s artist, Asawa