Zoya Cherkassky: The Global Political Crisis - Paperback

by Dieter Roelstraete (Author), Abigail Winograd (Author), David J. Levin (Author)

Published to accompany an exhibition on view at the Neubauer Collegium, this book features a suite of new works by Soviet-born Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky.

This book, published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Neubauer Collegium in the fall of 2025, explores a suite of erotic works by Soviet-born Israeli artist Zoya Cherkassky. Nearly seventy drawings in Cherkassky's signature diaristic style and five large acrylic paintings invoke the erotic tradition in art history as an ironic form of political engagement. An introductory essay by Neubauer Collegium Curator Dieter Roelstraete considers Cherkassky's humorous paean to the "joy of sex" as a knowing, defiant response to contemporary conflicts. Curator and art historian Abigail Winograd presents Cherkassky's vision of everyday desire in the context of long-running feminist debates over representations of the female body. Touching on the vexed issue of free expression at a moment when political and cultural leaders seem to have very clear ideas about what art should say and do (or, just as patronizingly, what it shouldn't say and do), the works make a compelling case for the pleasures of interpretive freedom.

Author Biography

Dieter Roelstraete is the curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches. Abigail Winograd is an independent curator and writer. David J. Levin is the interim faculty director of the Neubauer Collegium.