• Special exhibition opening and film screening: Revolution of Dignity. Art Exhibit: Images from Ukraine's Maidan, 2013–2014 and Damian Kolodiy's Freedom or Death! (Feb 15, 2017)
• CIM – A transformative exhibition of contemporary art (Dec 7, 2016)
• The Ukrainian Museum's Exhibition Catalogue Receives Prestigious College Art Association's 2016 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums (Feb 8, 2016)
• News archives

Media inquiries: it(a)ukrainianmuseum.org

Special exhibition opening and film screening:
Revolution of Dignity. Art Exhibit: Images from Ukraine's Maidan, 2013–2014 and
Damian Kolodiy's Freedom or Death!
February 26, 2017 at 2 p.m.

In commemoration of those who perished during the Euromaidan protests, later known as the Revolution of Dignity, that took place fall and winter of 2013–2014. More than 100 civilian protesters, the "Heavenly Hundred," lost their lives in the brutal attacks by government forces. The Ukrainian Museum is pleased to present the exhibition from Ukraine Revolution of Dignity. Art Exhibit: Images from Ukraine's Maidan, 2013–2014 and the screening of the documentary film Freedom or Death! (2015) with filmmaker Damian Kolodiy.

The Kyiv Maidan of 2013-2014 wrote both a vivid and a tragic page in the book of world history. Time and distance will allow for a more profound analysis, and in particular for multifaceted artistic reflection. The art that spilled out on Independence Square during that winter deserves special study and attention, however. A powerful, spontaneous creative energy flooded Kyiv's squares and streets and permeated the Internet; it changed and formed a new dimension within society and the country.

The Maidan protests in the winter of 2013-2014 spurred an enormous outpouring of creative expression among participants and supporters, within Ukraine and across the global community: from visual art to musical productions, from performances to poetry. These creative works invoked the joys and the horrors of protest and inspired the current exhibition, which is presenting visual art from the following Kyiv artists throughout the US and Ukraine: Julia Beliaeva, Gleb Vysheslavskyy, Anton Hauk, Olena Golub, Marianna Honcharenko, Andriy Yermolenko, Nick Zavilinskyi, Marian Luniv, Olexa Mann, Roman Mykhailiuk, Anastasia Nekypila, Maria Pavlenko, Ivan Semesyuk, Andrey Sidorenko, Tetiana Rusetska, Irena Khovanets, and Oksana Chepelyk.

While the featured works were created in many mediums, including painting, collage, embroidery, and photography, this exhibition presents all the works in printed form. This is quite symbolic: among the Maidan's huge explosion of art forms and genres, posters and prints were the most effective at conveying a strong message, and the most popular. Presenting the works of these artists in print form is the defining concept of this exhibition. It has also allowed the organizers to present the exhibition in various cities, universities, and institutions and to forego prohibitive transportation and insurance costs. Today's technology also allows the exhibition to be shown in several places at the same time.

The Ukrainian Museum is the exhibition's first location in New York, the fifth in the U.S., and the fourteenth overall. At each location, a new poster of one of the 17 artists has advertised the exhibition. The Ukrainian Museum poster is composed of prints from Andriy Sydorenko's video When the Lie Loses Power.

This traveling exhibition, which is on display at The Ukrainian Museum from February 15 through March 26, 2017, owes its success to the work of a team of dedicated international professionals from the Fulbright Program, the Ukrainian Fulbright Circle, the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Kyiv, and the Modern Art Research Institute of the National Arts Academy of Ukraine.

Film screening immediately follows the exhibition opening.

Freedom or Death!
Directed by Damian Kolodiy
Ukrainian, Russian w/English subtitles
73 min
2015, USA/Ukraine
Meet the Director! Q&A after the screening.
Admission $10

Ukrainian-American filmmaker Damian Kolodiy will present his completed documentary “Freedom or Death!” Narrated by the director, the story unfolds with the shift from peaceful demonstrations to violence, and chronologically tracks how the civil uprising in Kyiv became a hybrid war with Russia having global ramifications. Q&A after the film.

The Ukrainian Museum's film series and traditional arts programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

CIM – A transformative exhibition of contemporary art (Dec 7, 2016)

December 11, 2016 – September 3, 2017

CIM is an exhibition that plays on the notion of the collective, and what cultural and ethnic topographies bind first and second generation Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian born artists from the New York City area. The word "CIM" means "seven" in Ukrainian, and this exhibition convenes seven individual experiences as a collective of artists working in a wide range of styles and media. The seven contemporary artists participating in this group exhibition are Luba Drozd, Adriana Farmiga, Maya Hayuk, Roman M. Hrab, Yuri Masnyj, Christina Shmigel, and Marko Shuhan. CIM will be open to the public from December 11, 2016 through September 3, 2017.

Finding a thread to connect the artists and their practices can sometimes prove to be elusive in group shows. The artists in this show produce work that ranges from the abstract to the representational to the conceptual, from object-based to installation scale work, incorporating drawing, painting, sculpture, and video and sound. Despite this variance, a dialogue bridging the aesthetic, the figurative, the tangible and the intangible is established between the artists and the works chosen for this exhibition by guest curator Roman Hrab.

"It's exciting to be in an exhibition of fellow artists who are alive, young, and full of next-generation vitality," said exhibiting artist Maya Hayuk. "It's one of the most innovative, progressive, and conceptually challenging exhibitions The Ukrainian Museum has ever seen, thanks to the incredible curatorial vision of Roman Hrab and Museum Director Maria Shust. This exhibition also happens to come at a time when our world and the most basic paradigms of 'reality' seem to be in a free fall. To celebrate what we've accomplished as well as those generations before us gives me peace and hope for the future as simply a human."

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
A softcover, color illustrated, bi-lingual (English and Ukrainian) catalogue titled CIM accompanies the exhibition. In addition to the guest curator's introduction, the catalogue includes transcripted interviews with the seven participating artists conducted by Olena Chervonik, Daniel W. Dietrich II Curatorial Fellow in Contemporary Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art. The one-on-one interaction between artist and commentator serves to amplify the viewer's discourse with the exhibited works of art.

Read more about the exhibition and participating artists.

The Ukrainian Museum's Exhibition Catalogue Receives Prestigious College Art Association's 2016 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums

New York, NY
February 8, 2016

Photos l-r: (1) Myroslava Mudrak and DeWitt Godfrey; (2) Olha Ivanova; (3) Myroslava Mudrak, the award for Tetiana Rudenko is visible in the foreground

The 2016 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions went to the team of co-curators Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko for the catalogue Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name that had been organized by The Ukrainian Museum in New York in cooperation with the Museum of Theater, Music, and Cinema Arts of Ukraine in Kyiv, and had been shown at The Ukrainian Museum from February 15-October 4, 2015.

The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship was established in 1980 in honor of the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art and scholar of early-twentieth-century painting. This award is presented to the author or authors of an especialy distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in the English language under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. In 2009, the College Art Association (CAA) established a second Barr award for the author(s) of catalogues produced by smaller museums, libraries, and collections with an annual operating budget of less than $10 million. The 2016 award year covers catalogues published between September 1, 2014, and August 31, 2015, and The Ukrainian Museum congratulates Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko for achieving such a distinction and becoming the newest recipients of this prestigious award.

Myroslava M. Mudrak accepted the juried award for herself and on behalf of Tetiana Rudenko at a ceremony that took place during Convocation at the 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC, on Wednesday evening, February 3, 2016, led by DeWitt Godfrey, president of the CAA Board of Directors. Olha Ivanova, counselor for cultural affairs at the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States of America, attended the ceremony, and took part in handing the award to Myroslava M. Mudrak.

Prof. Mudrak thanked the Association and members of the Jury for the recognition and used the occasion to point out the larger implications of the award, especially drawing the public's attention to the current situation in Ukraine as it struggles to realign itself with Western values. "There are parallels to be drawn between the 1920s, as covered by our exhibition, and the threat of regression faced by the current forces of politics. Then, an entire generation was lost to Stalin's cleansing; our exhibition, drawn from the largest collection of Ukrainian theater design in the world, sought to honor their unfettered artistic spirit." She thanked the staff and the Board of The Ukrainian Museum, most especially its Director, Maria Shust, for their tireless efforts in producing quality exhibits. She also thanked Lidia Lykhach of Rodovid Press for her cooperation in the production of the catalogue.

The Jury consisting of David Dearinger, Boston Athenaeum, Chair; Kelly Baum, Princeton University Art Museum; Alison de Lima Green, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Peter Sturman, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Thayer Tolles, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, cited the pioneering qualities of research presented in the catalogue and underscored its revelatory significance, as it brought to light an understudied and often overlooked chapter of European Modernism. The Jury also pointed out that one of the achievements of the contributors' scholarship on the Ukrainian avant-garde of the first decades of the twentieth century is that it makes clear that "these artists, filmmakers, dancers, scenographers, theater directors, and costume designers deserve to be considered alongside their better known counterparts in the Paris and the Russian avant-gardes. Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s stands as a model of the rich insights to be gained from interdisciplinary, cross media investigations that are grounded in the study of primary documents and concrete social history."

Myroslava M. Mudrak is Professor Emerita, Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University. She has curated many exhibitions and authored a number of books, the most recent one being the catalogue of The Ukrainian Museum's exhibition Borys Kosarev. Modernist Kharkiv 1915-1931 (Rodovid Press, 2011). She studies Modernism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in relation to philosophical and stylistic developments of the West.

Tetiana Rudenko is Chief Collections Manager of the Museum of Theater, Music, and Cinema Arts of Ukraine in Kyiv. Among her other publications is a coauthored book on Anatol Petrytsky titled Anatol Petrytskyi. Teatralni stroi ta dekoratsii zi zbirky Muzeiu teatralnoho, muzychnoho ta kinomystetstva Ukrainy (2012).

The Exhibition Catalogue

Color illustrated, bi-lingual (English and Ukrainian), 276-page, softcover catalogue Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s.

The publication features critical essays by consultative curators Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko, and includes contributions by these acknowledged experts: Nicoletta Misler, Professor of Russian and East European Art at the Istituto Universitario Orientale, Naples (University of Naples); John E. Bowlt, Professor, Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Director of the Institute of Modern Russian Culture, and specialist in the history of modern Russian art; Valentyna Chechyk, Professor, Department of Art History and Theory at Kharkiv State Academy of Art and Design (Ukraine); Hanna Veselovska, Professor at the Department of Theater Theory and Criticism, the Karpenko-Karyi National University of Theater, Cinema, and Television in Kyiv; Mayhill Fowler, Stetson University, Department of History, specializing in the cultural history of Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe.

The catalogue, priced at $49, is available in the Museum shop and online.

Essays in the catalogue:

• From the Easel to the Stage Set: The Avant-Garde Painter and the Theater by Myroslava M. Mudrak
• Vadym Meller: Missionary of Avant-Garde Scenic Design by Tetiana Rudenko
• A Total Play of the Body: The Art of Movement and the Ukrainian Stage by Nicoletta Misler
• Scenic Transformation and the Ukrainian Avant-Garde by John E. Bowlt
• Gordon Craig, Avant-Garde Art, and Ukrainian Scenography of the Late 1910s by Valentyna Chechyk
• On the Path to Innovation and Experiment: Ukrainian Theater Direction of the First Third of the Twentieth Century by Hanna Veselovska
• Berezil: Theater as Institution in Soviet Ukraine by Mayhill Fowler

About the Museum

The Ukrainian Museum acquires, preserves, and exhibits articles of artistic or historic significance to the rich cultural heritage of Ukrainian Americans; its collections include thousands of items of folk art, fine art, and archival material. At its founding in 1976 by the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, the Museum was hailed as one of the finest achievements of Americans of Ukrainian descent. Since then, and particularly since its move in 2005 to a new, state-of-the-art building in Manhattan’s vibrant East Village, it has become known as one of the most interesting and dynamic smaller museums in New York City. Each year, the Museum organizes several exhibitions, publishes bilingual (English/Ukrainian) catalogues, and presents a wide range of public and educational programs, including concerts, films, lectures, courses, workshops, and special events.

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