About The Museum

Museum History

Since 1976, The Ukrainian Museum has been a vital part of New York’s cultural landscape — a showcase for Ukraine’s rich artistic heritage and complex history, dedicated to preserving its folk art traditions while celebrating its unique contributions to 20th century and contemporary art.

The Museum was founded by the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America with a collection that dates to 1933, when the UNWLA purchased 600 folk art items for the Ukrainian pavilion at the Chicago World’s Fair — items that would form the nucleus of the Museum’s collection decades later. Ukraine was then under Soviet and Polish rule, and the pavilion was the only one at the World’s Fair not backed by an independent national government — it was funded entirely by the Ukrainian community in the United States. Two million people visited the pavilion.

After World War II, when all of Ukraine fell under Soviet rule, the UNWLA resolved to establish a museum to house, preserve, and exhibit the folk art collection it had acquired. A nationwide fundraising campaign followed, and on October 3, 1976, the Museum opened in Manhattan’s East Village — the neighborhood where generations of Ukrainian immigrants had settled. Today, the collection encompasses more than 8,000 folk art objects, 3,300 works of fine art, and 35,000 archival items — one of the largest collections of Ukrainian cultural heritage outside Ukraine.

When the exhibition Crossroads: Modernism in Ukraine opened in 2006, The New York Times noted that artists long attributed to Russian culture were, in fact, Ukrainian — a recognition that speaks to the Museum’s longstanding commitment to restoring accurate cultural context to Ukrainian art.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, that mission has become more urgent than ever. That same year, with support from Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Booth Ferris Foundation, the Museum launched SAFE, its global initiative supporting museums and cultural workers in Ukraine, which was recently recognized with a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation.

Through programming and exhibitions like the current The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet and A Living Canvas, the Museum is deepening its community partnerships, welcoming the thousands of Ukrainians displaced since 2022, and reimagining its physical space as an open threshold — for immigrants, for neighbors, and for anyone seeking connection to Ukrainian culture and to each other.

We do so in a spirit of celebration, but also with reckoning and resolve, as a statement of resistance to any force seeking to erase Ukrainian identity and the Ukrainian people’s will to exist as a free nation.