Raino Isto
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 at Trinity Washington University. Their work has been published in Art History; Third Text; RACAR; ARTMargins; the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art; Science Fiction Studies; Extrapolation; Open Philosophy; the International Journal for History, Culture, and Modernity; International Labor and Working-Class History; and The Getty Research Journal.
In 2021, they were a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Art Studies in Tirana, Albania, and before that an ACLS Leading Edge Fellow at the Educational Video Center in NYC. Previously, Raino was the arts education coordinator at the Umpqua Valley Arts Association in Roseburg, OR (in 2020), and a doctoral fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (in 2018-19). 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 are currently at work on a book about realism, engaged art, the global Cold War in postwar Albania. They have curated multiple exhibitions, including Pleurad Xhafa: Irreconcilability as an Act of Love (2022) at ZETA Contemporary Art Center, and False Monarchy (2018) at the Stamp Gallery, University of Maryland, and co-curator of Unto Itself: Kameelah Janan Rasheed (2017) at the Herman Maril Gallery, University of Maryland.
Raino also has published several catalog essays on Albanian postwar art, and worked as a consultant on a municipal public art plan for Tirana. They are a founding member of the Laboratory for Albanian Art and Culture (LACA). (2025)
- Links
