This exhibition was organized in partnership with Jewish Museum of Maryland and is located at 15 Lloyd Street, Baltimore, MD 21202

"Across Life-Worlds: A Family History of Soviet Jewish Emigration”

August 9 – March 17, 2027

Curated by Victoria Smolkin & Vlad Smolkin

Press Release

Curated by Vlad Smolkin (Director of CPM Gallery) and Soviet Historian Victoria Smolkin, the exhibition places the stories of a group Soviet Jewish families who came to Maryland in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s in conversation with the global and national politics that enabled their emigration. Through presenting a selection of lived experiences, the exhibition explores how American and Soviet Jews, who began as distant strangers on opposite sides of the Cold War divide, came to see each other as family. 

The exhibition curators, themselves children of Soviet Jewish emigration, capture family stories in interviews, photos, home videos, and objects that reflect the years before their departure and after their arrival—a period that also marks the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

From the American side, the exhibition features the stories of Maryland activists who dedicated themselves to making Soviet Jewish emigration a reality. From the Soviet side, the exhibition features the propaganda and politics that shaped Jewish life in the Soviet Union, from the pages of Pravda to the archives of the KGB.

Together, the exhibition presents the collision of life-worlds at the point when ideas and ideals coalesced into life choices. For Soviet Jewish families—persecuted for their ethnic identity and alienated from their religious roots—emigration entailed both a rupture from their past and the possibility to re-envision their future.

Curator Bios

Victoria Smolkin was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and emigrated to the United States in 1989 with her parents and brother, co-curatorVlad Smolkin. She is Professor of History at Wesleyan University and received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship examines atheism, religion, ideology, and the politics of memory in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. She is the author of the award-winning book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism (Princeton University Press, 2018). Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, among others. In addition to her scholarly publications, her writing has appeared in Politico Magazine, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and she frequently shares her research through public lectures and media appearances. She is currently completing her book, No Monument: Life, Death, and the Wall of Memory in Soviet Kyiv, a study of Soviet memory politics that also examines the political and cultural landscape in which Soviet Jewish activism and emigration emerged.


Vlad Smolkin was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and emigrated to the United States in 1989 with his parents and sister, co-curator Victoria Smolkin. He is an artist, curator, and founding director of CPM Gallery in Baltimore, where he presents an international roster of contemporary artists, publishes limited edition prints, and partners with a range of curators, writers, and scholars. Across his work, he creates spaces for collaboration and critical reflection, asking how individuals might see and act within the systems that organize their lives. Smolkin received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2012 and has exhibited nationally and internationally. His artistic and curatorial work has been featured in Frieze, Artforum, Forbes, The Washington Post, Artnet, Hyperallergic, BmoreArt, among others. He has served as a visiting artist, critic, and lecturer at institutions including Moore College of Art and Design, Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, Massey University in New Zealand, Art Institute of Boston, and Wesleyan University, and has taught in the graduate Art History Department at Georgetown University.