This site celebrates the lives and work of two Latvian artists, photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011) and painter Juris Tifentals (1943-2001), together since 1967.

Art Days was an annual, official arts festival during the Soviet era. It was a slightly more open and tolerant structure than the regular, professional art exhibition and commission circuit. For that reason, Art Days became the primary context where Tifentals exhibited his work during the Soviet times, more precisely a few times during the 1970s while he had a valid membership of the Young Artists’ Union.

Tifentals’ paintings could not be widely exhibited because of his explicit anti-establishment position. Dzividzinska’s work was shown only in photo club exhibitions that attracted almost exclusively an insider spectatorship. For these reasons, their work has remained mostly unknown.

This online memorial is titled “Art Days Forever” in a symbolic gesture that aims at celebrating the two artists despite of all the official art establishments and their agendas.

Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska and painter Juris Tifentals chose to go against the current and live outside the official art establishment of Soviet Latvia. For that reason, their lives and works remained unknown to art historians and broader audiences until the 1990s. But even after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the subsequent renovation of Latvia’s independence, their contribution has remained largely unknown and misunderstood. Both died in great suffering and poverty.

None of Tifentals’ paintings have ever been purchased by any museum. A few of Dzividzinska’s photographs have been acquired by the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, Latvia, and the Nancy and Norton Dodge collection of Soviet Nonconformist art, currently housed at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at the Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA.

However, most of their legacy - paintings, drawings, photographic prints, negatives, contact prints, notes, and documents - is at a risk of perishing. Places and objects that used to bear witness to their lives, dreams, and ideals, including their country house slash studio slash darkroom, their garden, their Riga apartment, and their immense book collection — are already lost.

This website is an attempt to give both artists a voice, even though only a mediated and fragmentary one.

Dr. Alise Tifentale, art historian and the artists’ daughter

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A personal message from Alise Tifentale, the founder of Art Days Forever:

“Art Days Forever begun as an intimate journey through loss, grief, and coping with nostalgia. It was the winter of 2011, my first winter in New York and my first winter without both of my parents. Every night, I was sitting alone in my tiny Brooklyn bedroom and studying for the exams at the PhD program in art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. I felt lost, isolated, and detached. Suddenly, I didn’t have a place in the world that would be home for me.

I was desperately wanting to attach myself to anything that could help me rebuild some of that sense of home and belonging that disappeared with the passing of my mother. One way of doing that, I thought, would be to keep surrounding myself with my parents’ books, art, and other objects that embody the concepts of home, safety, and love for me. It was clear, however, that such a method could work only metaphorically.

Almost ten years later, I returned to Riga, Latvia, to confront the abundance of mementos, art, and miscellanea in my parents’ archive, waiting for me in storage in two locations.

While it is not possible to keep most of these objects, I decided to keep images of them. Now I am sharing those images on www.artdays.net. The website is the forever home of my parents’ estate for me, and a functional historical resource about the life and work of two unusual and remarkable artists for art historians, curators, collectors, and anyone else who is interested.”

Riga, April 14, 2020