BEYOND THE PALE, weaves together several related narratives that I have been working with in the studio for the last 2 decades. The project has grown from a single work, meant as an homage to the great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, to include a large cast of characters: among them, artist Luibov Popova, actor, director and Eisenstein’s beloved mentor, Vsevolod Meyerhold, actress Zinaida Reich, Meyerhold’s second wife. My focus then expanded from Constructivist Art of the early Soviet Period to the fate of the artists and their work, when Joseph Stalin become the final arbiter of art, life, and death.
After the success of Battleship Potemkin (1925), in early 1930, Sergei Eisenstein left Moscow, landing in Hollywood, under contract to B. P. Shulberg and Paramount Pictures. He produced 3 rough scripts; the last, a 100+ page treatment of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which was never produced. Since 2020, I have been seriously involved with images from Eisenstein’s treatment as well as Dreiser’s text.
The third strand refers to the “Pale of Settlement”; a term used by the Russian Empire, to describe the borders in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed, from 1791 to 1917. This is the place on the globe where my mother and my father’s parents were born. Most of this land is present day Ukraine.
Current events have made these themes increasingly pressing.
–Jenny Snider
Jenny Snider is best known for her black and white dance drawings, painted wooden taxis, and large Soviet History paintings. She has spent her working-life teaching Studio Art. She has lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University, the University of Vermont, Drew University and Philadelphia College of Art. In 2011-2012, she spent a year in Rome as a winner of a Rome Prize in Visual Art, at the American Academy of Rome. Her work is in public and private collections nation-wide. Jenny Snider lives and works in Kingston, NY.
