The Ukrainian Museum

Exhibition

Maria Prymachenko: GLORY TO UKRAINE

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A wild dog hunted a hare, but did not catch it, 1972. Paper, gouache. Collection of the Ponamarchuk Family.

7 October 2023 – 7 April 2024

For over 60 years, Maria Prymachenko created art based profoundly on her Ukrainian upbringing and wildly creative imagination. Despite having no formal art training, Prymachenko over the years was able to create a wide range of art: drawings, paintings, ceramics, illustrations, and even embroidered garments. She was known during her lifetime for her brilliantly colored and inventive scenes of animals – lions, bears, birds, horses, and strange behemoths – covered in riotously hued, almost psychedelic patterns. Additional themes included traditional village life, the Ukrainian landscape, and flowers. Always drawing on village traditions and later dreams for inspiration, Prymachenko also included creative critiques about various dramatic social events in her work. During the mid and late 20th century, she was Ukraine’s most beloved artist; her artworks have appeared on stamps and even the country’s coinage.

This exhibition at The Ukrainian Museum will feature over 100 paintings, unique ceramic works, bespoke embroidered blouses, wooden plates, and several children’s illustration books. The exhibition will highlight Prymachenko’s creative talent and visionary outsider esthetics born out of a history of traditional Ukrainian village arts and crafts movements. This will be the first exhibition of Prymachenko’s art outside of Europe.

WEARLOOM: UKRAINIAN GARMENTS

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7 October 2023 – 17 January 2024

An expansive and new interpretation of traditional Ukrainian embroidery and costumes curated by model and fashion designer Helena Christensen, this exhibition will address the esthetics of embroidered and historic garments and accessories from a female and wearable perspective. Pushing the physical boundaries of institutional fashion exhibitions, the project will start with classic mannequin presentations and morph to large wall installations of both small and large garments, highlighting the stylistic complexities of the many regions of Ukraine. Traditional costumes from the Poltava and Carpathian (Hutsul) regions will also feature build-ups of individual garments all the way to the entire outfit, which will then be presented on two mannequins, delineating the steps a woman takes to dress for a festive occasion. The exhibition will be accentuated by a selection of traditional headdresses and jewelry.

OLEKSANDR GLYADELOV: FRAGMENTS

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Lobby Installation through 3 March 2024

Oleksandr Glyadelov’s photographic exhibition features sites and events documented by him across Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion. The images function as timestamps profoundly recording the devastation and survival during the ongoing war. Glyadelov captures urban scenes and rural settlements often just hours after the destruction. His images instantaneously elicit memories of traumatic news from Irpin, Bucha, Borodianka, Izium, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Moshchun, Kyiv, Kherson, Bakhmut… Glyadelov’s empathetic presence is felt in the startling scenes of life that unravel in the shelters of Ohmatdyt, Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital; in the yards of solitary villagers who decided to stay and rebuild their households; on the routes of evacuation and at the sites of military encampment. The landscapes in his photographs are charged with historical grief and insight, forever altered by the imposed violence, much like a Dnipro estuary pictured on several images in this exhibition where freshwater and saltwater meet.

Born in 1956 in Legnica, Poland, Oleksandr Glyadelov has lived and worked in Kyiv since 1974. He graduated from the National Technical University of Ukraine “Kyiv Polytechnic Institute.” His work addresses humanitarian crises, child homelessness, HIV/AIDS, drugs addiction, prisons, and military conflicts. Over the years he has cooperated with organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, UNAIDS, UNICEF, and many others. Since 1989, as an independent professional photojournalist, he has covered military conflicts in Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Ukraine. He deliberately photographs with an analogue camera on black-and-white film. Glyadelov is the winner of the 2020 Shevchenko Prize.

Janet Sobel: wartime

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28 April – 3 September 2023

Janet Sobel is a rediscovered Ukrainian American artist who influenced the New York art world in the 1930s and 1940s, shortly after she began painting. 

Sobel (1893–1968) was born Jennie Olechovsky in what is now Dnipro, Ukraine. She moved to Brooklyn with her mother and siblings in 1908, shortly after her father’s death. At 16, she married Max Sobel, with whom she had five children. 

Sobel took up painting at the age of 44, in 1937. Her son Sol, an art student at the time, recognized his mother’s talent and promoted her work. Sobel’s early work often incorporated images and experiences from her Ukrainian childhood: the abundant floral motifs of Ukrainian folk art, traditional Jewish families, soldiers with cannons and imperial armies. Her main goal was visual intensity, which she attained with impressive regularity. 

The art collector Peggy Guggenheim included Sobel’s work in a 1945 group show called The Women at her Manhattan gallery Art of This Century; the following year, Sobel had a solo show at the gallery. 

Janet Sobel: Wartime is the first museum exhibition focusing on Sobel’s early work. Over forty-five drawings, created in the decade after she began painting in 1937, highlight her rise to much-talked-about and prominent artist. This important period in her artistic career positioned her to be part of the ground-breaking Ninth Street Art Exhibition (1951), which marked the formal debut of Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement with international influence. Sobel was one of only three women included in the show. 

But her fame did not last long. She was not easily categorized by the art world, and the media often referred to her as a mother and housewife first, then as an artist. While she initially received attention for being an outsider artist (self-taught), she was just as quickly forgotten for the same reason.  

Several recent press articles refer to Sobel pioneering the drip-painting technique made famous by Jackson Pollock. Her best-known work, Milky Way (1945), at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was made a year before Pollock’s first drip painting, Free Form, which is also at MoMA. 

Sobel is said to have completed more than 1,000 works. This exhibition is organized from the private collection of  Gary Snyder. 

Lesia Khomenko: IMAGE AND PRESENCE

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28 April – 6 August 2023

Lesia Khomenko is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist from Ukraine who since the Russian invasion has been the focus of global media discussion and attention. Her approach is to reconsider the role of painting: she deconstructs narrative images and transforms paintings into objects, installations, and performances. Her artworks have mocked Soviet Socialist Realism’s erroneous attempt to create a perfect utopian society and fantasy people, and she has probed past state-sanctioned creativity and its long-lasting impact on current artistic practices.

This exhibition, Khomenko’s first solo museum show in North America, reflects on the artist’s creative method and her incessant investigations of identity and politics, particularly in the context of the Russian war in Ukraine.  

Khomenko’s Count Down series reimagines prominent socialist realist battle paintings by Soviet Ukrainian artists. In her canvases, Khomenko eliminates the valorous figures of soldiers and military equipment, presenting instead a depopulated terrain. 

The large-scale works created for the Ukrainian Museum, particularly Radical Approximation and Fragmented Surveillance, grow out of the haze of war in cyberspace and quote the footage of military operations available online. These canvases resonate with earlier works where Khomenko depicts unidentifiable armed figures in the abstract manner, which investigates the protective technique of blurring and masking strategic objects, landscapes, and military faces in photographs from the frontlines.

The transportable, rolled paintings in the MPATS series capture Khomenko’s own experience of living through the early stages of war and evacuation, and witnessing warfare in real time, where arms fall under the category of collective needs and are held sway by collective usage decisions. (MPATS = man-portable anti-tank system) 

In her new body of work, AJS,Khomenko initiates a dialogue with the Abstract Expressionist painter Janet Sobel, whose early images are also on display at the Ukrainian Museum. The installation symbolically bridges decades of narratives that were fragmented and concealed due to forced migration, resocialization, ruptures, and survivals. 

   

Symbols in Ukrainian Folk Art

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Lower Level installation through 17 January 2024

Ukrainian folk art is filled with mysterious symbols that for generations have been applied to various items, imbuing them with magical and protective powers. People believed that these objects protected them from evil. They brought and preserved good luck, ensured prosperity, and helped fulfill wishes, hopes, and desires. The symbols were applied to everyday items made of various materials – textiles, leather, wood, metal, clay, eggs, and even bread – using techniques such as carving, embossing, painting, weaving, embroidering, and baking. Over time, the meaning of these symbols was forgotten, but they gradually evolved into elaborate ornamental designs that serve as a vivid attestation of the creative ingenuity of the Ukrainian people. Among these items are the ubiquitous pysanka (Easter egg) and an array of embroidered items – ritual cloths (rushnyky), men’s and women’s shirts, and other items of apparel – with their wealth of ornamental designs from various regions of Ukraine.

   

Postcards from Ukraine

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Lobby Installation

Postcards from Ukraine aims to record the damage inflicted on Ukrainian culture from the bombing and shelling by Russian troops since Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

Since this war began, Russian troops have been destroying Ukraine’s historical, architectural, and archaeological monuments every day. The Russian military is cynically and ruthlessly shelling museums, memorials, university buildings, and cinemas, and dropping rockets on churches, temples, cathedrals, TV towers, and monuments. Russia is not just destroying Ukrainian cities and villages; it is systematically destroying Ukraine’s cultural heritage, which dates back thousands of years.

Today, more than ever, we need solidarity and support from the international community.

This project was developed by the Ukrainian Institute with the support of USAID and in cooperation with the creative agency Green Penguin Media. We also thank Oleksandr Vynohradov and Yulia Hrubrina for their expert collaboration. For more information, visit: https://ui.org.ua/en/postcards-from-ukraine/

   

Maks Levin: In Defense of Truth and Freedom

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Photo: Maks Levin
Photo: Maks Levin

26 June 2022 – 5 March 2023

The body of photojournalist Maks Levin – unarmed, wearing a press jacket, and bearing signs of torture before being shot twice by Russian soldiers – was found outside Kyiv on 1 April 2022. A 40-year-old father of four, Levin had been photographing Russia’s war on Ukraine since the initial invasion in 2014. This exhibition features 25 of Levin’s final photos, most of them taken since February 2022.