Dr. Maria Garth is an art historian and curator specializing in global modern and contemporary art and the history and theory of photography. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Art and Architecture at the University of Oregon during the 2024-2025 academic year, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on modern art in a global context. She received a Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, with a dissertation about photography in the Soviet Union. At Rutgers, she taught undergraduate courses on twentieth-century photography and contemporary photography. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and P.E.O. Foundation. As a Dodge Avenir Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from 2018 to 2023, she researched the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, and curated the 2021 exhibition “Communism Through the Lens: Everyday Life Captured by Women Photographers in the Dodge Collection.” Her research publications have appeared in the Journal of Russian American Studies, Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, Proceedings of the National Library of Latvia, and SEQUITUR. She earned an M.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.F.A. in Visual Art: Photography from Boise State University.
Publications
Garth, Maria. “Camera Communism: Women Photographers, Avant-Garde Art, and Documentary Aesthetics in the Soviet Union, 1920s-1980s.” PhD diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2024. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3060931845.
Garth, Maria. “George Kennan’s Photography Collection of Political Exiles in Labor Camps of Late Imperial Siberia.” Journal of Russian American Studies, 6.2 (2022), 120–145. https://doi.org/10.17161/jras.v6i2.18630.
Garth, Maria. “Issues, Challenges, and Insights: Art Historical Research on Latvian Art and Photography at the Zimmerli Art Museum (USA).” Proceedings of the National Library of Latvia, 9.29 (2022): 42-57. https://dom.lndb.lv/data/obj/1055522.html.
Garth, Maria. “Soviet Avant-Gardes and Socialist Realism: Women Photographers Bridging the Divide, 1930s-1960s.” Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, 1.2 (2022): 188-220. https://doi.org/10.1163/25896377-00102002.
Garth, Maria. Communism Through the Lens: Everyday Life Captured by Women Photographers in the Dodge Collection. New Brunswick, NJ: Zimmerli Art Museum, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/50138532/Communism_Through_the_Lens_Everyday_Life_Captured_by_Women_Photographers_in_the_Dodge_Collection.
Garth, Maria. “Painting, Photography, and Radical Depictions of Gender: Franz Gertsch and Lissa Rivera.” SEQUITUR Vol. 6, Issue 1 (Fall 2019).
http://www.bu.edu/sequitur/2019/11/30/painting-photography-and-radical-depictions-of-gender-franz-gertsch-and-lissa-rivera/.
Garth, Maria. “Memory and History in the Archive: Photographs of Political Dissidents in Forced Labor Camps in Late Nineteenth-Century Siberia.” Master’s thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/101195.
Courses Taught
University of Oregon:
History of Photography
Contemporary Art
Modern Art 1880-1950
Museology
Topics in Global Modern Art
Special Studies Modern Art
Rutgers University:
Contemporary Photography
Twentieth-Century Photography
Exhibitions
Communism Through the Lens: Everyday Life Captured by Women Photographers in the Dodge Collection
(April 29-October 17, 2021),
Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
https://zimmerli.rutgers.edu/node/128.
