The Happiest Autumn exhibition was prepared to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the museum dedicated to the sculptor Vadim Sidur (1924–1986). The curator Yaroslav Aleshin, who headed the museum from 2015 to 2019, selected the image of a gravestone as the leitmotif of the exhibition. Back in Soviet times, Sidur had been almost completely deprived of any opportunity to display his works publicly, and so the design of funeral monuments became one of his few sources of income, as well as a way of gaining access to the public space for his work. It was proposed that Siddur’s memorial legacy be taken as an object of investigation and interpretation by the artists Vladislav Efimov, Mikhail Maximov and Yuri Palmin, the composer Vladimir Gorlinsky and the historian Anna Kotomina, each of whom created new works for the museum. The exposition was supplemented with documentary materials reflecting the life history of the sculptor and the history of the museum. The title The Happiest Autumn was borrowed from an eponymous collection of poems by Vadim Sidur, on which he worked until the end of his life. The collection was published in 1990, following the opening of the museum.