Exhibition

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.

2 May – 1 September 2024

The Ukrainian Museum is excited to present the exhibition Peter Hujar: Rialto, opening on 2 May 2024. Peter Hujar (1934-1987) exemplified the downtown New York arts scene. He was born to an immigrant family, and his Ukrainian grandmother raised him exclusively in the Ukrainian language until he was 5 years old. His difficult and unstable upbringing in a troubled household influenced his artistry and vision significantly as Hujar turned to a career in photography. He learned from some of the greatest photographers in the industry, and his training, paired with his identity and background, resulted in the powerfully disruptive and influential photographs that he created in the early years of his career. He would later plant his roots in the heart of New York City’s East Village, also known as the Ukrainian Village, where he would be enthralled by the world of performance art, music, theatre, and literature. 

The life and art of Peter Hujar were synonymous with a downtown New York that no longer exists. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the East Village was an urban buffet of creativity and danger, yet always vibrant and inexpensive. Private by nature, combative in manner, well-read, and widely connected, Hujar inhabited a world of the known and unknown. This exhibition at the Ukrainian Museum will feature 75 of Hujar’s earliest photographs – from 1955 until 1969. Portraits, country landscapes, and city life will be the focus of the exhibition. Yet, three important vectors or series that appeared in his work during this period will also be highlighted in-depth for the first time: the Southbury (1957), the Florence (1958), and the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo (1963). Hujar’s Southbury, Connecticut, work focuses on his visit to the Southbury Training School for mentally challenged students, which still operates today. The Florence photographs were taken during one of Hujar’s trips to Italy and feature neurologically impaired children. The Capuchin Catacombs series documents another of Hujar’s trips, this one to Sicily, where the exposed corpses in the Catacombs create a macabre spectacle that highlights some of the customs and traditions of Palermo society from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. 

In his Ukrainian Village loft studio, near various iconic Ukrainian establishments such as the restaurant Veselka and the Ukrainian Museum, Peter Hujar focused on those who followed their creative instincts and dreamed about mainstream success. His studio in the former Louis N. Jaffe Art Theatre (now the Village East Cinema) was a meeting point (rialto) for the original and flamboyant. These earliest Peter Hujar photographs are a little-known prequel to his widely discussed and influential work as one of New York’s seminal photographers. 

9 February – 21 April 2024

How do the terms “beauty’” and “culture” function relative to one another in various disciplines, including craft and design? Various art historical models are often used to frame the cultural expressions of a singular community.

Traditional Ukrainian arts and crafts, or folk art, include decorative painting, embroidery, pottery, textile weaving, woodworking, and egg decorating, with styles and designs particular to different regions of Ukraine. A majority of these crafts were traditions that originated and flourished in rural areas and villages. Various symbols and meanings from both the pre-Christian and Christian eras intertwined with each other. Kilims, textiles, and ceramics were incorporated into every home not only as decorative elements, but as family traditions and history. All the objects in the home were interconnected aesthetically; nothing existed on its own.

A key component of Ukrainian folk art is the pysanka (plural: pysanky), an embellished egg whose crafting dates back to pre-Christian culture. The word comes from the Ukrainian verb pysaty, to write.

At first glance, pysanky appear to be well-designed, beautiful self-reflections of the maker. But their rhetoric has an underhanded virtuosity, capable of producing unexpected effects. As the modernist architect Le Corbusier once remarked, the purpose of a home and its design is to move us. Pysanka artisans, then, consistently realize architecture’s highest aim: they create works whose extraordinary power lies not only in how deeply they make us feel, but also in how they let us see the complexity of our feelings, in meaningful environments that help us live or dwell.

Currently, we live in a world with a focus on the individual and on all the goings-on of individual issues. This exhibition will raise questions such as, What is beauty? How does the pinnacle of Ukrainian folk culture, the pysanka, position itself within design? In which spaces did these objects originate? Can these beautiful eggs raise visitors’ spirits? This begins to unravel the subtle elements of beauty, with various definitions of the word.

9 February – 9 June 2024

Pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa were important centers of new artistic movements in Ukraine, and many well-known artists of the historical avant-garde in Europe began or spent a considerable part of their professional careers in those cities. Because the movement originated when Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire, the Ukrainian avant-garde has often been confused with the Russian avant-garde. The slow process of reclaiming what was appropriated by the Russian cultural space began in the late 1980s and became especially invigorated after Ukraine regained its independence in 1991. The Ukrainian Museum has been at the forefront of this process, showcasing the work of such artists as Alexander Archipenko and Borys Kosarev, as well as presenting the group exhibitions Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s (2015) and The Impact of Modernity: Late 19th and Early 20th Century Ukrainian Art (2019).

This exhibition displays English- and Ukrainian-language books from the Museum’s library, including a few of our own catalogs, that underscore the contributions of Ukrainian artists to the avant-garde movement. The featured artists in print include Alexandra Exter, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Archipenko, Borys Kosarev, Vadym Meller, Heorhii Narbut, Vasyl Yermilov, Alexander Bogomazov, Mykhailo Boychuk, and Anatol Petrytsky. The exhibition also includes a selection of books discussing the movement as a whole and Ukraine’s place in it. The publications on display are augmented by a few works on paper from the collection donated to the Museum by Dr. Jurij Rybak and Anna Ortynskyj (except Archipenko’s lithograph). For the most part, they are drawings of stage costume designs by Alexandra Exter, Isaac Rabinovich, Anatol Petrytsky, Vadym Meller, and Mykhailo Andriienko-Nechytailo.