SHUVALOVO, Russia - Dmitri Kaminker, a prominent St. Petersburg sculptor, says he is one of only two members of his family who have not fled their native land in the past two decades.
"It's a dirty job to be a Russian," he jokes. "But somebody has to do it."
The 53-year-old artist is due to arrive in Baltimore today as a guest of the Maryland Institute College of Art. He will be constructing a sculpture in the traffic island in front of the Lyric Opera House, at Mount Royal Avenue and Cathedral Street, as part of Baltimore's celebration of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg from Feb. 13 to March 2.
Kaminker is not sure exactly what he and his son Daniil, 25, will build. He likes to build spontaneously, preferably out of discarded materials. But he said he was toying with the idea of erecting a triumphal arch made of plywood similar to those built every May Day in Soviet times around the former Soviet Union, honoring the Bolshevik victory in 1917.
If a piece of the Soviet past doesn't seem the most obvious statement for a work in Baltimore, Kaminker likes making unlikely connections between cultures.
In recent years, he's sculpted Stalin as a Pharaoh, one of several works dedicated to an imaginary "Soviet-Ancient Egyptian Friendship Society." He's chiseled a wooden statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the feared Soviet secret police, depicting him as a vicious Don Quixote whose nose doubles as a guillotine.
He also recently built a garishly painted wooden model of the architect Vladimir Tatlin's celebrated "Monument of the Third Communist International," the 1919 design for a corkscrewing constructivist edifice that became a symbol of the Russian avant-garde. (It was never built.) Kaminker calls his version the third tower of Babel - with the Biblical tower, of course, being the first and the Soviet Union the second.
As an artist, Kaminker's is often witty, sardonic and playful. And although he doesn't boast about it, he's in demand. He has worked in Denmark, Canada and the United States over the past dozen years. Now, he has a commission to build a major public sculpture in St. Petersburg.
The Russian State Museum, which owns the world's largest collection of Russian art, has purchased 16 of his works. The museum's program for a 1999 exhibition praises "the heights that the sculptor has already scaled, the originality of his artistic explorations and the diversity of his plastic discoveries."
In the early 1980s, Kaminker and his friends - including other sculptors, painters, ceramicists and photographers - founded an artists colony here, in the village of Shuvalovo. They moved to what was then a tumbledown community of dachas outside the city, seeking to escape both the headaches of urban life and the relentless scrutiny of the Communist Party.
The gregarious Kaminker is an instinctive politician, and he became the unofficial mayor of his community. And the settlement at Shuvalovo grew, the Russian Museum program noted, into "a serious rival" to art circles in the city of St. Petersburg. A recent modern art show at the Manezh gallery in central St. Petersburg included works by about 20 Shuvalovo artists.
Guiding a visitor around the village during a recent visit, Kaminker gunned his mud-splattered Nissan sedan down its snowy streets, past weathered wooden homes. Pointing to a banya - a Russian sauna - a few blocks from his house, he said it's become a nightly watering hole for gangsters from St. Petersburg.
"It's a pretty funny life," he said at one point, in colloquial, breezy English. "Strange, idiotic, crazy. The society here in Russia? It's not structured, like in England. Here, everything has meaning. In my studio, I see millionaires, ministers and bandits."
The artists' rambling home - which he shares with his wife, son and daughter - is crammed with sculptures made of stuff he's found lying around the village: old bolts, door handles, stove doors, signboards and slabs of wood. (Kaminker loves wood, even though it eventually rots. "I will also rot away," he observes. "It's a pity we can't last forever, either.")
Indoors, his sculptures, big and small, are lined up on shelves, stashed in closets and jammed in the crowded attic - where they are partly hidden by drying laundry. Outside, his snowy back yard is filled with huge, totemic wooden figures. It looks like a kind of Russian Easter Island.
Kaminker's cheerful persona masks a tragic past. Both his grandfathers fell victim to Russia's sometimes brutal history. One was Jewish and was murdered in a pogrom. The other, a non-Jew and teacher in Smolensk, perished in Stalin's prison camps.
His father, an orphan, became head of a physics institute here, in what was then called Leningrad. Kaminker himself decided to pursue art rather than science and graduated from the city's Vera Ukhina School of Art and Industry in 1973.
After a year in the Soviet Army, he worked as an assistant to artists creating public sculptures for the government. Producing massive Socialist Realist monuments wasn't exactly fulfilling. But, he says, "it was good training for making good stuff."
In his spare time, he tinkered in his sub-basement studio on works that authorities never would have permitted him to show.
By the early 1980s, St. Petersburg's artists were split into two major factions. Members of the first, the Union of Artists, produced officially sanctioned works. Members of the Pushkinskaya group, meanwhile, defied Soviet authority, creating underground art. (The dissidents took their name from an apartment house at 10 Pushkinskaya St., where many lived.)
Kaminker and his artist friends didn't identify themselves with either faction. They just wanted to be left alone. "So we just moved away," he says.
They sought space to work, materials to work in and the freedom to do what they wanted. They found Shuvalovo, a former dacha community north of the city. Most of the homes were abandoned. Scrap wood and metal were scattered everywhere. And the authorities seldom bothered to venture so far into St. Petersburg's hinterlands.
They moved in, patched the places up and started to work.
After the Soviet government lifted its ban on foreign travel for most Russians in 1985, Kaminker began seeking foreign commissions. Since then, his projects have included a sculpture garden in Toronto and a casino in Denmark.
Today, Kaminker has a commission from St. Petersburg to produce The Stone Oarsman for one of Petersburg's newer neighborhoods. He'll use rough-hewn 18-ton stone blocks to suggest a man rowing. (Kaminker says his Oarsman suggests an allegory of Russia. "When you're sitting in a boat with heavy oars, you're sitting with your back to where you're going," he says.)
At some point, he says, he hopes to build in St. Petersburg a "megalithic telephone" - a fountain built around a giant effigy of an old-fashioned dial phone, rendered in stone.
Even as he pursued his career, Kaminker battled to save his community. As in most of Russia, the question of exactly who owns the long-abandoned homes in Shuvalovo was a murky one. (Kaminker's house, for example, belonged to a German man who fled the 1917 Revolution.)
During the 1990s, shady "businessmen" from St. Petersburg tried to evict Shuvalovo's artists-in-residence. But city authorities, evidently, have decided that the colony is too valuable to lose. Last year, they started granting residents title to their homes - starting with Kaminker's.
Because of its village atmosphere and proximity to the city, Shuvalovo has become some of the most valuable real estate in the area. "I'm a squire now," Kaminker says, gesturing toward his wooden house. "This is our Hermitage."
Against all odds, Kaminker's decision to remain in his homeland seems to have been a rational one, after all. "All my friends live in New York, Copenhagen and Sydney," he says. "We decided not to move so far away, just to the suburbs."
Dimitri Kaminker: Sculptor, a retrospective of the artist's work, will be on exhibit Feb. 6 through Feb 16 in MICA's Pinkard Gallery, 1401 Mount Royal Ave. Call 410-225-2300 or visit www.mica.edu.