Rutgers University in New Jersey has received a large collection of Soviet-era art, philly.com reported.

Nancy Dodge, widow of famed economist and art collector Norton Dodge, is the donor of the collection, which contains over 17,300 artworks.

The collection contains the work of more than 1,000 artists, painted between the 1950s and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, including works from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia and other former Soviet republics.

Rutgers University has become the main place in the world to study the works of art created throughout the USSR for four decades.