1995

The Bird

Russian, born 1960

The featured subject of this print is a symbolic amalgam of the bluebird of happiness from Russian folklore and the American idea of freedom (suggested by the red, white, and blue pattern of its wings). The people, set in a landscape borrowed from a nineteenth-century American painting, are metaphors for the complexities involved in the pursuit of utopian ideals embodied by the American dream. A visage combining the features of the famous nineteenth-century figures Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and American landscape painter Frederic Church observes the mayhem from the sky.