Opens May 17, 2026
Fifty years is both a milestone and a threshold. As The Ukrainian Museum marks half a century of collecting, preserving, and interpreting Ukrainian art and culture in New York, we find ourselves at a moment that calls not for a retrospective glance, but for something more alive — a reimagining of what this collection has always held, and what it might yet reveal.
A Living Canvas — is the name we have chosen for this anniversary exhibition, and it is also, we believe, the truest description of what a museum can be. A canvas is not inert. It is the ground upon which meaning accumulates, changes, and deepens with each generation that encounters it. Our collection is a living tissue of cultural memory — threaded through with untold stories, unresolved questions, and enduring beauty — that refuses to be fixed in time.
What you will encounter in these galleries is our collection as you have not experienced it before. In lieu of a conventional thematic or chronological account of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, A Living Canvas is organized around the formal threads — Color, Form, Geometry, Figuration, Texture, Line, and Ornamentation — that weave the fine arts with the decorative art of textiles, costume, and folk art across centuries and geographies.
This organization reflects something essential about Ukrainian art: that the boundary between the village workshop and the artist’s studio was always fluid and mutually beneficial. The connections between the woven kilim and the painted canvas, the embroidered rushnyk (ritual cloth) and the modernist composition are materially tangible by sharing the same visual language. A Living Canvas makes visible their common qualities.
A Living Canvas also pays tribute to the curatorial team that shaped it and to the institutional memory they embody: Dr. Myroslava M. Mudrak, Professor Emerita of Art History at The Ohio State University, who has defined the critical frameworks through which Ukrainian modernism is understood; Lubow Wolynets, the Museum’s Folk Art Curator, whose deep knowledge of the collection’s textile and decorative holdings is unparalleled; Founding Director Maria Shust, under whose leadership the Museum’s foundational identity was formed; and Maria Rewakowicz, Head of Collections, whose stewardship has preserved and expanded the permanent collection. These four are not only the architects of the exhibition, they are part of the story it brings to life.
