Past Exhibitions

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.

7 October 2023 – 21 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.

Lobby and second level installation through 8 September 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.

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. 

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. 

   

Lower Level installation

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.