Authors

Alyona Sokolnikova¹;  ¹ Independent Scholar, Germany

Discussion

The monthly journal Decorative Art of the USSR (Dekorativnoe Iskusstvo or DI USSR) was published in Russian by the Union of Artists of the USSR from 1957 to 1993 with a circulation of 6,000 to 42,000 copies. One of the founders and ideologists of the magazine was the philosopher and art theorist, Karl Kantor, who guided the magazine's editorial direction. Under his supervision, the magazine not only covered Soviet and foreign folk, decorative and monumental art, but also articulated an artistic approach to design, its social and cultural functions, and explored the boundaries between design and craft.
The current study is based on an analysis of the number of women from different regions of the USSR and the types of their projects mentioned in the journal from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Based on this data, the author intends to address the following issues:

1. to present the existence of professional boundaries for women in various types of craft and design in the USSR and to consider the role of regional and national culture in these processes;

2. to provide a decolonial perspective on the representation of different regions of the USSR in the journal. Comparative analysis of published materials allows us to reveal the internal hierarchy of the Soviet republics in relation to the RSFSR and to consider possible issues of exoticisation of their national culture.