Ivan Cherniakov is a PhD student in art history at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was awarded Krannert Art Museum’s Research Fellowship in European Art before 1900 for the 2025–2026 academic year. He recently curated Landscapes in Construction, selecting artwork from the permanent collection for display in the Rosann Gelvin Noel Gallery, as part of Art Since 1948.
Every summer a select number of artworks rotate in and out of Art Since 1948, the museum’s collection gallery dedicated to modern and contemporary art, curated originally by Amy L. Powell. The rotations are primarily light-sensitive works—drawings, prints, and photographs—that require rest after display. The gallery’s Dialogues section, which focuses on works on paper, features new themes every year, often highlighting recent acquisitions or old favorites.
Assistant Curator Kathryn Koca Polite asked Research Fellow Ivan Cherniakov to share his curatorial approach to the project.
Ivan: Landscapes in Construction showcases diverse approaches to representations of landscape from the second half of the 20th century to today. While landscapes are predominantly associated with grand and idealized portrayals of nature, works by such artists as Al-An deSouza, Walker Evans, David Ligare, Bea Nettles, Fritz Scholder, and Art Sinsabaugh demonstrate how depictions of land and environment have also served as a lively field of artistic experimentation. Playing with landscape’s illusionism and subverting it, artists have interrogated the social and material relations that mediate and construct how we perceive the world around us. Why do we see certain places as domesticated and familiar, while others as remote and exotic? What makes us see uninhabited territories as empty wastelands, and how do completely artificial environments appear to us as natural paradises? Some artists here have also used landscapes to reimagine how we might treat the land and its human and nonhuman inhabitants differently, with respect and care for the shared past and futures.
Landscapes in Construction will be on view through June 1, 2027.
