The Ukrainian Museum

Maya Shkolnik

The Empty Chair: In Memory of Maksym Kryvtsov

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The Empty Chair: In Memory of Maksym Kryvtsov

Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country has lost countless artists, writers, musicians, photographers, and cultural figures who chose to defend their homeland. One of them was Maksym Kryvtsov — a Ukrainian soldier, poet, and photographer whose words and images continue to resonate far beyond his lifetime.

The program includes an open reading of Maksym’s poetry, inviting guests to read his poems in Ukrainian or English. Set in a quiet space with live music and visuals, this gathering is not a performance but a collective act of remembrance. Maksym’s sister, Anastasia, will be present during the event. This event is presented by Rebirth. Ukraine, the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, the Ukrainian Museum, Nash Format, and the Maksym Kryvtsov Foundation.

Admission to the Ukrainian Museum’s new exhibition, A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum at 50, is included with this ticket purchase. More information about the exhibition is available here: https://www.theukrainianmuseum.org/living-canvas-the-ukrainian-museum-at-50/

Saturday, June 27
2 – 4 pm

Tickets

Members’ Preview: The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet | Zhanna Kadyrova

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Members’ Preview: The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet | Zhanna Kadyrova

In The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet, Kadyrova explores displacement, resistance, and regeneration through the transformation of Ukraine’s physical landscape. Across five bodies of work created following Russia’s full-scale invasion, she considers how land itself responds to the threat of erasure with renewal.

Working across sculpture, embroidery, photography, and film, Kadyrova examines the earth as a site of violence, memory, and resilience. From the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and its reservoir ecosystem to the mining of agricultural land, these works attest to the persistence of everyday life under extraordinary pressure.

Three ongoing series—Palianytsia, Russian Rocket, and Embroidery (2022–)—continue to expand in response to the ongoing war. Palianytsia takes its name from the Ukrainian bread that became a marker of identity under occupation. Russian Rocket superimposes missile imagery onto landscapes encountered by the artist. Embroidery consists of woven portraits that contrast domestic calm with the constant presence of air alarms.

The large-scale video installation The Forest (2023–2025) examines the aftermath of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023 and the unexpected regrowth emerging from the exposed reservoir bed. Created in collaboration with the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv, the City of Zaporizhzhia, and the Khortytsia Museum, the work also involves participants from the region.

The film IDP (2026) follows the evacuation of Origami Deer, a monumental sculpture removed from Pokrovsk in 2024 as the front line approached. The work traces its journey from a park where it stood on the base of a decommissioned Soviet bomber through Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Brussels, and Paris, to the Venice Biennale, where it anchors the Ukrainian Pavilion’s Security Guarantees exhibition. Origami Deer has become a symbol of hope and survival.

Kadyrova lives and works in Kyiv. She is the recipient of the 2012 Kazimir Malevich Prize, the 2013 PinchukArtCentre Grand Prize, and the 2025 Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Castello di Rivoli, Ludwig Museum Budapest, and Kunstverein Hannover.

Saturday, June 20
4 – 6 pm

Tickets

KOLO With Zhanna Kadyrova

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An event for young Professionals

An event for young Professionals. Museum after hours with wine & cheese reception and Q&A with the artist. Attendees must be 21+. General $10, Members $5

In The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet, Kadyrova explores displacement, resistance, and regeneration through the transformation of Ukraine’s physical landscape. Across five bodies of work created following Russia’s full-scale invasion, she considers how land itself responds to the threat of erasure with renewal.

Working across sculpture, embroidery, photography, and film, Kadyrova examines the earth as a site of violence, memory, and resilience. From the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and its reservoir ecosystem to the mining of agricultural land, these works attest to the persistence of everyday life under extraordinary pressure.

Three ongoing series—Palianytsia, Russian Rocket, and Embroidery (2022–)—continue to expand in response to the ongoing war. Palianytsia takes its name from the Ukrainian bread that became a marker of identity under occupation. Russian Rocket superimposes missile imagery onto landscapes encountered by the artist. Embroidery consists of woven portraits that contrast domestic calm with the constant presence of air alarms.

The large-scale video installation The Forest (2023–2025) examines the aftermath of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in June 2023 and the unexpected regrowth emerging from the exposed reservoir bed. Created in collaboration with the Dovzhenko Centre in Kyiv, the City of Zaporizhzhia, and the Khortytsia Museum, the work also involves participants from the region.

The film IDP (2026) follows the evacuation of Origami Deer, a monumental sculpture removed from Pokrovsk in 2024 as the front line approached. The work traces its journey from a park where it stood on the base of a decommissioned Soviet bomber through Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Brussels, and Paris, to the Venice Biennale, where it anchors the Ukrainian Pavilion’s Security Guarantees exhibition. Origami Deer has become a symbol of hope and survival.

Kadyrova lives and works in Kyiv. She is the recipient of the 2012 Kazimir Malevich Prize, the 2013 PinchukArtCentre Grand Prize, and the 2025 Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Castello di Rivoli, Ludwig Museum Budapest, and Kunstverein Hannover.

Saturday, June 20
6 – 8 pm
21+

Tickets

Annual Membership Meeting

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Annual Membership Meeting

The Ukrainian Museum’s Annual Membership Meeting will take place on Sunday, June 14, at 2:00 p.m. at the Museum, 222 East 6th Street, New York, NY 10003.

Sunday, June 14th 2pm

With You, The Unknown Becomes An Adventure

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A Community Performance by Tisto Studio

“With You, The Unknown Becomes An Adventure” is a community impression performance created by participants of Tisto Studio’s From Presence to Performance course in New York. This is not a traditional play, but an abstract collective odyssey in which the performers are real people—not professional actors—exploring body, voice, presence, and connection. Through body movement, personal text, live sound, and collective images, the performers search for a way home: to themselves, to their people, and to presence, by exploring the themes of war, displacement, selfhood, belonging, and the courage to be seen in a world that feels unstable and unfamiliar.

This performance is directed by Igor Kliuchnyk, founder of Tisto Studio, and co-created by Maria Vaniieva.

Tisto Studio is a New York-based experiential studio that uses acting, improvisation, and performance tools to help non-actors build presence, confidence, communication, and human connection.

Tickets are available on Zeffy. Seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors open at 2:30 PM. All proceeds from ticket sales support the Ukrainian Museum and its cultural mission.

Admission to the Ukrainian Museum’s new exhibition, A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum at 50, is included with this ticket purchase. A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum at 50 traces the formal elements that illustrate the deep affinities between the fine and folk-art creations of Ukrainian masters—works that, collectively, express a worldview of hope and expectation, an ever-present quality of the Ukrainian sensibility. More information about the exhibition is available at:
https://www.theukrainianmuseum.org/living-canvas-the-ukrainian-museum-at-50/

Saturday, June 13
3 – 5 pm

Tickets

Ukrainian Refugee Women: Journey Across Generations

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Ukrainian Refugee Women: Journey Across Generations Panel Discussion

In honor of The Ukrainian Museum’s 50th Anniversary, the Spartanky of Plast Ukrainian Scouting Organization present a special panel discussion bringing together the compelling voices of Ukrainian refugee women — those who came to the United States after World War II and those who have arrived in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Across generations and across vastly different circumstances, their stories reveal a shared resilience, creative spirit, and unwavering commitment to Ukrainian heritage.

RSVP to [email protected].

Sunday, June 7
2 – 4 pm

Behind the Iron Curtain: Making Fashion in Soviet Ukraine, 1945–1991

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Behind the Iron Curtain: Making Fashion in Soviet Ukraine, 1945–1991| Public Lecture & Archival Film Screening

Far from the stereotype of a grey and monotonous Soviet life, post-war Soviet Ukraine developed a vibrant fashion industry shaped by designers, fashion houses, factories, state institutions, and international ambitions. Join us for a public lecture and a screening of rare archival documentary films from Ukraine, offering a unique insight into fashion production, visual culture, and identity in Soviet Ukraine between 1945 and 1991. Our guest speaker will be Dr. Olha Korniienko, a historian of modern Ukraine specializing in fashion and culture. Dr. Korniienko will examine the work of fashion houses, designers, and the broader mechanisms through which fashion functioned within the Soviet system. The presentation will also address how Ukrainian fashion was presented internationally, and how questions of national identity emerged in tension with central Soviet authority. The screening features rare archival films from Ukraine, including rarely seen footage of fashion houses in Kyiv, Lviv, and Kharkiv, fashion shows, and more. 

Dr. Olha Korniienko is the founder of the Ukrainian Fashion History Digital Archive and currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions for Ukraine (MSCA4Ukraine) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and is currently working on her book Fashioning Freedom: Ukrainian Soviet Fashion from World War II to Independence, 1945–1991.

Saturday, June 6
2 – 4 pm

Tickets

THE UKRAINIAN MUSEUM’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON OPENS WITH TWO SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS

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THE UKRAINIAN MUSEUM’S 50TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON OPENS WITH TWO SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS

Our Milestone year launches with Zhyve Polotno / A Living Canvas and The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet — the first North American museum exhibition of the work of Zhanna Kadyrova.

NEW YORK, NY — The Ukrainian Museum opens its 50th anniversary year with Zhyve Polotno / A Living Canvas and The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet — the first exhibitions in a rich series of programs that will unfold across 2026–2027.

In this moment, when Ukraine and its vibrant culture face an existential threat, the Museum’s mission is more urgent than ever: to preserve and advance Ukrainian art and heritage, and to serve as a vital instrument of resilience that attracts a broad audience of local residents, students, scholars, artists, tourists, and New Yorkers seeking to engage with diverse histories and contemporary issues.

Zhanna Kadyrova — The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet

Second Floor Gallery; Glass Box; and Museum Lobby  •  Opens June 20, 2026
(Press Preview: June 18, 12 – 6 pm)

In The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet, Kadyrova explores the experiences of displacement, resistance, and regeneration through transformations of Ukraine’s physical landscape. Across five bodies of work made in the years following Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kadyrova considers how Ukraine’s land, the earth itself, responds to the threat of erasure with renewal.

Through sculpture, embroidery, photography, and film, Kadyrova lays bare the ways in which ‘Earth’ becomes a site of violence, memory, and resilience. From the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and decimation of its reservoir ecosystem to the mining of agricultural land, the five works that comprise the exhibition attest to how ordinary life survives despite extraordinary pressure.

Palianytsia, Russian Rocket, and Embroideries (2022–) are three ongoing works created in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion, which Kadyrova will continue to enlarge as long as the war continues.

Palianytsia is her iconic series named for the Ukrainian bread that became a marker of identity under occupation; Russian Rocket the series of short videos superimposing Russian rockets onto landscapes visited by the artist; and Embroideries consists of woven portraits that conflate domestic tranquility with the persistent presence of air alarms.

Kadyrova’s large-scale video installation The Forest (2025) examines the consequences of the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russia in June 2023, and the surreal new growth rising from the dried bed of the destroyed reservoir. Realized with The Dovzhenko Centre film archive in Kyiv, the City of Zaporizhzhia and the Khortytsia Museum, The Forest is part of a collaborative effort with locals from the Zaporizhzhia region.

The film IDP (2026) documents the evacuation of Origami Deer from Pokrovsk, a city in the Donetsk region, in 2024, when the war’s front line approached. The film traces the monumental sculpture’s odyssey from the park where it sat on a plinth that previously held a decommissioned Soviet bomber, through Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Brussels, and Paris, to the Venice Biennale, where it is the centerpiece of the Ukrainian pavilion’s Security Guarantees exhibition. Origami Deer has become a symbol of hope and survival.

Kadyrova lives and works in Kyiv. She is the recipient of the 2012 Kazimir Malevich Prize, the 2013 PinchukArtCentre Grand Prize, and the 2025 Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Castello di Rivoli, Ludwig Museum Budapest, Kunstverein Hannover, and institutions across Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.

Zhyve Polotno / A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum at 50

Main Floor and Lower Level Galleries  •  Opened May 17, 2026

In marking its 50th anniversary, The Ukrainian Museum presents selections from its permanent collection in a novel framework: not chronological but through the formal threads — Color, Form, Geometry, Figuration, Texture, Line, Black & White, and Ornamentation — that run through fine art and folk art alike, binding them into a single, continuous visual culture. Paintings, sculpture, kilims, rushnyky (embroidered ritual cloths), traditional costume, and folk objects are placed in conversation through the aesthetic affinities that have always connected them rather than period or provenance.

This organization reflects something essential about Ukrainian art: that the boundary between the artist’s studio and the village workshop was never as rigid here as European academic tradition insisted. The woven kilim and the painted canvas share a formal intelligence. The embroidered rushnyky and the modernist composition speak the same visual language. A Living Canvas makes those connections visible. Read more about the exhibition, here, A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum At 50.

The Museum designed the exhibition in partnership with Cooper Union. The Museum is currently developing a formal long-term relationship with the School of Art and the School of Architecture, wherein faculty and students will engage directly with the Museum’s exhibition design work — contributing models, drawings, and fabricated elements to gallery installations, and working on real curatorial and community-centered design challenges within a living institution. This collaboration speaks directly to shared interests in social practice and the expanded public role of art institutions.

“The 50th milestone presents a unique opportunity to honor our history while reimagining our role as a vital cultural resource for the Ukrainian diaspora globally, recent arrivals displaced by war, and the broader New York community — Ukrainians and non-Ukrainians alike.”

“The Museum’s location in the East Village is central to its mission. For over a century, this neighborhood has been the hub of Ukrainian cultural life in the city while also playing a pivotal role in New York’s artistic and intellectual history. The Museum sees itself as a bridge between these histories — rooted in a diasporic community yet deeply embedded in the broader civic and cultural fabric. A key institutional priority is strengthening ties with local organizations, universities, and neighbors to ensure that small museums and community-based cultural institutions continue to shape the identity of the East Village as it evolves.”

— Elena Siyanko, Executive Director, The Ukrainian Museum

The Museum’s full slate of anniversary events, exhibitions, and institutional investment initiatives will be announced this summer.

ABOUT THE UKRAINIAN MUSEUM

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.

Founded by the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, the genesis of the Museum’s collections 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 collection decades later. Ukraine was then under Soviet and Polish rule; the pavilion was the only one at the Fair not backed by an independent national government. It was endowed entirely by the Ukrainian community in the United States. Two million people visited.

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, 3,000 fine art works, and 30,000 archival items — one of the largest collections of Ukrainian cultural heritage outside Ukraine.

When 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 and heritage.

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

Under new leadership and through programming and exhibitions like the current A Living Canvas and the upcoming  The Ground Shift Beneath Our Feet, the Museum is deepening its outreach and community partnerships, welcoming the thousands of Ukrainians displaced since 2022, and reimagining its physical space as an open, welcoming threshold — for immigrants, for neighbors, for anyone seeking connection to Ukrainian culture and to each other. It does so not only 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.