The art scene of cities I visited in the Central Federal District is largely defined by their proximity to Moscow. The strong gravitational pull of the capital draws cultural activity from the periphery to the center. This trend was mentioned by most of the artists and cultural figures that I interviewed during the trip. Consequently, it is particularly interesting to take a look at the exceptions to the rule.

The most notable exception is the art scene in Voronezh, where a small group of people and two cultural institutions have established a system that functions effectively at the city level. Located on one of the city’s main streets, the Voronezh Center for Contemporary Art is the only local, non-commercial art institution that supports contemporary art. I was welcomed by the Center’s long-standing chairman, Nikolai Alekseev, who told me about its history.

Essentially a volunteer organization, the Center was founded in 2008 by a group of Voronezh artists, many of whom subsequently made a name for themselves in Russia and abroad. According to these “founding fathers” (Ivan Gorshkov, Arseny Zhilyaev, Nikolai Alekseev, Mikhail Lylov, and Ilya Dolgov), the event that marked the beginning of the Center’s activities was the 2009 exhibition We’ll Take Action from Now, which presented works by “leading artists of the Black Earth region” and their Moscow colleagues. Until it got its own building, the Center organized exhibitions, master classes, and lectures at various venues across the city. By 2012, the city administration had begun to take an interest in the center’s activities. After perusing the list of disused buildings, the city proposed that the Center take over the Lenin House of Culture at the local aircraft factory. However, this enormous Stalin-era building, “with pot plants, numerous busts of Lenin, and massive columns,” as Alekseev described it, was far too big for its needs. As a result, the city proposed a smaller, central space on Revolution Avenue, which it leased to the Center free of charge. The first exhibition in this space, Revisiting the Space of Voronezh, opened on May 17, 2013, with works by German, Swiss, and Russian artists.

The Center has developed a Course for Young Artists, which it launched in 2010, before moving to its own premises. This project played a key role in the development of the local art scene. The Course comprises weekly classes, where the Center’s founders and invited speakers give lectures and discuss students’ work. Artist Kirill Garshin, a graduate of the course, answered the Center door when I rang. He and Alekseev explained that the Center is a multifunctional platform combining exhibition projects, educational programs, artist studios (which take up most of the premises), and a kitchen—a key space of interaction in Russian culture. After a lively conversation in the kitchen, I was invited to visit the Center’s studios and speak with artists. I began with Garshin’s studio, which has a queen-sized bed in the middle. Covered with a spread with a carpet print, there is a tradition that newcomers to the Center are photographed lying on this bed. Garshin and I mused that beds are a key place for the artistic process, often the source of interesting thoughts and ideas. We were thinking of Croatian artist, Mladen Stilinović’s Artist at Work (1978), a series of photographs depicting the artist lying in bed, cozily wrapped in a blanket. Garshin works mostly with painting. His interests include the analysis of the surface of the picture and the examination of the techniques and references used by painters today, including photorealism and the legacy of Francis Bacon. Another motif in his work is his native city and its small artistic community. Garshin showed me his latest large-scale paintings from the ongoing series The Garden of the Consumed King (2016– ), which focuses on the sensation of slow, drawn-out time, the time of doubts and expectations.

I then spoke with Evgeniya Nozhkina, also a graduate of the Course for Young Artists, who has excellent presentation skills. She focuses on the conceptual interpretation of materials and their possibilities. Nozhkina studied tapestry-making and aims to reinterpret the decorative and domestic functions of this form of applied art, which is considered somewhat outmoded. She led me to the next studio, which is shared by sculptor and painter Ivan Gorshkov and conceptual artist Anna Kurbatova. Like many other Voronezh artists, Kurbatova received a classical art education at Voronezh Art College, where she majored in painting. Most Center “recruits” are from this institution. Kurbatova showed us works in a range of media, from bricolages and “retouched” ready-mades to drawings and documentation of performances. A particularly interesting series consists of small studies on sandpaper depicting fragments of weathered Russian fences. The last artist I met was Tatyana Danilevskaya, who had studied languages and literature before taking up art. She makes different types of conceptualist works, as well as lectures-performances that analyze various discursive concepts and phenomena.

Together with Alekseev and Garshin, I went to H.L.A.M Gallery, which opened its doors in 2008 and mostly exhibits local artists. (In 2013, Ilya Dolgov’s project Herbarium was awarded the Innovation Prize, as the gallery’s founder, Aleksei Gorbunov, told us with pride.) The exhibition on view was a group show of recent works by Alekseev, Garshin, and Gorshkov. A few months later, Alekseev’s series Encounters (2016) left for the exhibition Experiences of the Imaginary, organized by Garage, which inaugurated the exhibition space on New Holland Island in St. Petersburg.

Local people have managed to create and maintain a healthy artistic ecosystem in Voronezh, one in which artists can develop and show their work, and which contributes to the relatively recent of image of the city as a dynamic cultural center.

I came to Kaluga at the invitation of Anna Senatova, curator of Tsiolkovsky Fest, who has just established a foundation for the support of contemporary art, a significant gesture in a city in which it which has no other support. The city administration does not consider it necessary to support contemporary art, seeing it as an ideological threat. Similar complaints were voiced by virtually all the people I interviewed in the cities of the Central Federal District.

I met with Senatova in one of Kaluga’s central hotels, which was showing photographs by Elena Mikhailova, a local graduate of the Photoplay School of Contemporary Photography in Moscow. Mikhailova also joined us. She is a professional fashion photographer who occasionally makes conceptual art, seeing no perspective for work of this kind in her hometown. I then went to the studio of artist Aleksei Vasiliev, located in an office building on one of the city’s main streets. Vasiliev was busy preparing for a solo exhibition, which was about to open at Triumph Gallery in Moscow. He explained that he mostly works with portraits, painted in a neo-expressionist style mixed with the aesthetics of street art in the spirit of Jean-Michel Basquiat. This was the end of our tour of the local art scene, as the other two artists that Senatova mentioned as worth seeing had moved to Moscow some time ago.

I saw something similar in Tula. The city’s contemporary art scene is concentrated around the Tula Museum of History and Architecture, which occupies a few small rooms in a historical building on a central street. The museum also has several temporary exhibition spaces, and was showing an exhibition of dolls at the time I visited. Museum Director Liliya Kashentseva told me that the museum organizes contemporary art exhibitions occasionally, sometimes with the help of guest curators from other cities. The frequency of such events, as in other regions of the Central Federal District, is limited by the marked reluctance of the city administration to support “untraditional” initiatives.

One of the last major projects that Kashentseva mentioned was the 2014 exhibition The True Story of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Pharmacist Kraft, curated by Leonid Tishkov. He invented a quasi-scientific story about the real-life pharmacist who founded a pharmacy in the seventeenth century. Kraft’s pharmacy (a total installation, to all intents and purposes) is presented on the first floor of the museum. The exhibition involved local and Moscow artists, including Armen Avanesov, who was an unusual choice: he is currently painting frescoes in the Nicholas-Zaretsky Church. Avanesov has exhibited in a number of contemporary art exhibitions with graphic artist Elena Luzgina, a member of the Union of Artists. Her work can hardly be called conceptual, as she acknowledges herself. That notwithstanding, her sporadic attempts to deviate from the canon meet with fierce resistance from her Union colleagues.

Given the context, I was impressed by the Baraban Art Platform on the second floor of one of the Museum’s buildings. This multidisciplinary project aims to bring together very diverse fields of culture. Established in 2015, the platform focuses mainly on experimental theater, as two of the founders, Evgeny Malenchev and Polina Shatokhina, told me. A number of the platform’s founders work at the Tula Academic Drama Theater, but this does not mean that the platform is closed to other areas of culture. The program plans to combine art, music, and theater, but, like other cultural institutions in the city, it is experiencing financial problems due to the lack of public and private support.

Tula gives the impression of a developed and flourishing Russian city that is simultaneously mired in tradition. The famous Tula gingerbread, the city’s symbol, is sold everywhere alongside souvenirs celebrating the city’s past as a center of ironworking and armaments. The mind-blowing Tula State Museum of Arms is housed in a building shaped like the pointed helmet of a medieval Russian soldier.

I was introduced to the Yaroslavl art scene by Yulia Krivtsova, curator at TEXTIL Cultural Center. The Center is located in the Krasny Perekop district in the former warehouses of the Yaroslavl Big Manufactory, founded in 1722. The large red-brick warehouses are perfect spaces for exhibitions, despite their distance from the city center. TEXTIL is about to renovate the space, but educational activities and projects continue in other venues. The Center’s office is located in a beautifully-designed space next to the exhibition space. Director Sergei Kremenev told me that the Center has a staff of five and sometimes brings in volunteers for specific projects. TEXTIL was launched by the non-commercial organization Regional Agency of Creative Initiatives, founded by Kremenev and Krivtsova a number of years ago. The agency implements projects ranging from public art to contemporary dance festivals. It focuses on working with the city: its history, its spaces, and, of course, its inhabitants.

I met several artists who had participated in TEXTIL’s most recent project, People Color Place (2015), in which artists and city inhabitants were invited to “transform and develop the area” with the help of colored paint. The project resulted in numerous wall paintings and graffiti located across the district. Pavel Zaroslov received a classical art education and mostly works on commercial commissions, creating designs for local cafés and developing printed materials for clients. Oleg Tokmakov is a professional photographer who works in both photojournalism and conceptual photography. I particularly liked his photo series Mom’s Joy (2012).

The next day, I went to the suburb of Bragino, where the non-commercial New Friends Gallery has recently opened. According to the press release, it serves as a “sociocultural platform for its district.” I was welcomed by photographer Yuri Galybin, whose exhibition was on view at the time. I found his ideas about photography, its history, and its place in the world to be very original. Galybin is a self-taught photographer and works outside the system.

I then went to the park in the city center, where I was met by street artist Nikita Afanasiev, better known as Pst. He outlined his work clearly and intelligibly: essentially it’s “urban sanitation.” With the help of stencils, Afanasiev decorates and enlivens empty walls and electricity transformers. He believes that this is the most effective artistic practice in the absence of funding for cultural activities.

In the cities I visited, contemporary art is supported by small groups of enthusiasts who try to create new or maintain existing structures on their own, having failed in their attempts to attract government funding. The lack of art schools, funding, and interest in contemporary culture—along with a discursive void—have had a major impact on the atmosphere in all of these cities, but Voronezh. As a result, many artists leave for Moscow or St. Petersburg or emigrate to the West.