Categories Art magazines Circulation 7,000/3,000 Final issue 1986 | Frequency Yearly Year founded 1979 | |
Editors-in-Chief Alexander Sidorov, Igor Shelkovsky | ||
A-YA (A-JA), Cyrillic:«a-Я» — журнал неофициального русского искусства (English: Magazine of unofficial Russian art), was an underground Russian art revue. A-YA was a magazine illegally prepared in the Soviet Union and then published in Paris from 1979 to 1986.
The editors were Alexander Sidorov (under the pseudonym «Alexej Alexejev») in Moscow and Igor Shelkovsky in Paris. A-YA was distributed in the U.S. by Alexander Kosolapov in New York. It consisted of 60 pages in A-4 format. There were 3000 edition copies (the first edition numbered 7000). A-YA was printed in both color and black-and-white.
An informal magazine, A-YA opened to the world the virtually unknown-to-the-public contemporary Soviet art and current Russian art, which for many years was to dominate the world's leading exhibition venues and auctions. It was from A-YA that people first heard the names Eric Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Dmitry Prigov and many others.