Raino Eetu Isto
Lecturer, Art Criticism, Museum Studies, Professional Writing, Art History and Archaeology
Raino Isto is an art historian, editor, artist, and curator currently based in Alexandria, VA. They are currently editor-in-chief at ARTMargins Online, and a member of the editorial board of ARTMargins print journal. They are a lecturer at University of Maryland, College Park, and American University. Their work has been published in Art History; Third Text; RACAR; ARTMargins; the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art; Science Fiction Studies; Extrapolation; the International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity; International Labor and Working-Class History; and The Getty Research Journal. Their work explores South-South cultural relations during the Cold War, aiming to rewrite dominant narratives of global socialist art. They also examine the intersection of legacies of state socialism, antifascist activism, and anti-colonial struggle in contemporary art.
Raino received their PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park, where their dissertation focused on the development of monumental sculpture in postwar Southeastern Europe, and the continuing resonance of socialist monumentality evident in the work of contemporary artists responding to the recent past. From 2016 to 2018 Raino was coordinator and curator at the Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland’s premier contemporary art space. They were a doctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 2018-19, an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow at the Educational Video Center in NYC (2020-21), and a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies in Tirana, Albania (2021-22).
In 2022, Raino curated Pleurad Xhafa: Irreconcilability as an Act of Love at ZETA Contemporary Art Center, and since 2022 they have helped organize events as part of the MANIFESTO project (Hijacking, Desertion, and Great Wave). They are the editor of Një Monument i Përbashket: Realizëm Socialist si Histori dhe Metodë [A Collective Monument: Socialist Realism as History and Method] (Tirana: Pika pa sipërfaqe, 2024). Raino is currently at work on a book about realism, engaged art, and the global Cold War in postwar Albania.
