Shtetl on Fontanka

On July 17, 2025, the exhibition “Shtetl on Fontanka. From Chagall to the Present” opened at the KGallery in St. Petersburg. It is dedicated to Jewish artists whose life and work are closely connected to St. Petersburg. Fontanka is one of the city’s rivers. The project’s curator is Dr. Valery Dymshits, a folklorist and scholar of Yiddish literature. The conceptual design of the exhibition was created by the theater artist Valery Polunovsky.

The large three-story exhibition, consisting of seven thematic sections, is permeated with the history and culture of Eastern European Jews. A significant part of the exhibits is directly or indirectly related to Yiddish. For the first time, the works of four generations of Jewish painters, graphic artists and sculptors who worked over the past 150 years in St. Petersburg (historically also known as Petrograd and Leningrad) were brought together. 24 artists are presented in total, from Isaac Asknaziy to Marc Chagall, Nathan Altman, Solomon Yudovin, Anatoly (Tankhum) Kaplan and many other world famous masters.

Visitors who come to the exhibition find themselves in an imaginary Jewish shtetl, as the artists viewed their home city, Leningrad, and get acquainted with the religious traditions of Judaism, Jewish theater, folklore, modern interpretations of Jewish folk art. The presented works allow us to view the city’s Jewish art as a coherent integral cultural phenomenon.

The exhibition is opened until September 14. The editor-in-chief of our website, writer and journalist Yoel Matveyev, attended the press premiere inauguration of the exhibition with the photojournalist Svetlana Smaznova.