About us

MORA Museum of International Art has gone through several transformations. Most recently, the museum changed its name from the Museum of Russian Art to MORA Museum of International Art in order to better reflect the museum’s politics, which always opposed the Russian government and since its founding has served as an intellectual-artistic hub for dissident and human rights activism. Earlier this year, we held a series of auctions to support Ukraine in this unimaginably difficult time in its history.

MORA was originally founded as C.A.S.E. Museum of Russian Art in Exile, and was paramount in introducing the art of Soviet émigrés to American audiences. With its core collection largely culled from human rights activist Alexander Glezer’s private holdings, the museum’s collection during its formative years was on a par only with that of Norton Dodge for that time. Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, notable artists first exhibited outside Russia at MoRA including Skate’s 5000 notables, Erik Bulatov, Alexander Kharitonov, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Evgeny Kropivnitsky, Lidia Masterkova, Vladimir Nemukhin, Ernst Neizvestny—the canon of late Soviet painting today. For the past three decades, MoRA has fostered Russian culture and community in the Tri-State area through exhibitions, events and lectures. The museum’s exhibitions have played a formative role in establishing the current Russian art market now negotiated in New York, London and Moscow. In the early 2000s, Margo Grant and Boris Belinkiy took the wheel as directors and continued to broaden the museum’s activities with concerts, international art fairs, new catalogs, a TV show about the arts, online exhibits and auctions, and an ever-widening horizon of artists from all over the world.