ukrainianmuse

18 December 2021 – 5 March 2023

Most of the works in this exhibition are on loan from private collections, and most are made of clay, Gerulak’s preferred medium. A given work can be about functional design or about purely creative art, and occasionally about both. Befitting her roots, Gerulak imaginatively continues to use beguiling imagery in her ceramic work, reflecting the same fascination with her heritage and the richness with which it can be translated into clay. She adapts iconic likenesses of mermaids, nymphs, protectresses, mother and child, villagers in folk costumes, and head adornment with floral wreaths to the style of her own figural ceramics so successfully that they manifest the unmitigated embodiment of womanhood. Gerulak draws upon lush imagery and abundant Ukrainian customs, but creatively renews and revises these traditions as well.

20 January – 15 April 2023

The Lemko artist Nikifor is considered one of the world’s finest outsider artists of his time. Born with a hearing and speech impediment and orphaned during World War I, Nikifor was unable to communicate with the people around him. He was initially treated like a misfit and ridiculed by the people of his hometown, Krynica. For most of his life, he found himself isolated both physically and emotionally. Art became an outlet, a focus for his life.

The topics of Nikifor’s art include self-portraits and panoramas of Krynica, with its spas and Orthodox and Catholic churches. Throughout his vast body of drawings, Nikifor interweaves classic landscapes and memories. Each drawing offers a kaleidoscope of both the familiar and the unfamiliar. Meticulous and lovingly rendered, his drawings range from those with the tightly wound tension of horror vacui, where absolutely no space on the paper is without the hash mark of a pencil, to others that breathe with open space and create a different type of tension, leading to the question of what is missing. It is a unique and powerful approach to landscape imagery. Unmarked open areas appear to exert pressure on the forms found populating the page, as if a strong gust of wind or invisible field is in fact occupying space, unseen to the viewer.

Nikifor (born Epifanii Drovniak, 1895–1968) gifted us with a visual index of a lifetime’s worth of visual information, regurgitated and reassembled in countless ways. Each drawing is a window offering a deeply internal vortex of forms and articulations rendered in watercolor and colored pencils. For Nikifor, who was non-verbal, art-making was his communication.

The exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum includes 135 works from its collection. Curated by Myroslava Mudrak, professor emerita of art history at The Ohio State University, the exhibition will be accompanied by a major catalogue to be published by Rodovid Press in Kyiv.

Nikifor is funded in part by:

Prof. Zirka Voronka in memory of husband Prof. Roman Voronka

20 March 2021 – 27 September 2022

Throughout history, people have seen flowers as vessels to project all kinds of meanings and messages. At our birth and death, flowers have always been by our side. Flowers have instilled in us great meaning and symbols. In turn, we cultivate flowers to help convey our deepest emotions, signal change, and celebrate life stages. The exhibition In Bloom: Nature and Art explores the impact of the flower motif through the prism of Ukraine’s traditional arts and crafts and the works of its preeminent artists of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In Bloom showcases more than 50 artworks by 21 artists, and over 60 art objects, all highlighting floral themes. Among the artists featured in In Bloom are Alexis Gritchenko, Jacques Hnizdovsky, Vasyl Hryhorovych Krychevsky, Nina Klymovska, Luboslav Hutsaliuk, Mychajlo Moroz, Oleksa Novakivsky, and Arcadia Olenska-Petryshyn. Numerous traditional art items are on view: woven kilims, women’s costumes, embroidered shirts, intricately decorated Easter eggs (pysanky), and ceramics from the Hutsul region. The exhibition is curated by Jaroslaw Leshko, Professor Emeritus of Art, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and Lubow Wolynetz, the Museum’s curator of folk art.