When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited New York’s Ukrainian Museum last September during his trip to speak at the UN General Assembly, he brought international attention not only to his country’s fight for survival but also its rich artistic tradition.
The Ukrainian Museum sits in the heart of the East Village, a part of Manhattan that became the creative epicenter of the world’s art capital in the second half of the 20th century.
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Once called the Lower East Side, the neighborhood had long been a simple grid of tenements teeming with immigrants. First, there were the Germans in the early 19th century, followed by the Irish, Italians, and Jews. A wave of Ukrainians and Poles came after World War II and mixed with a subsequent wave of Puerto Ricans.
One of the most recent demographic invasions was that of the Yuppies (young urban professionals), who have been transforming the neighborhood from the city’s art workshop into more of a showcase window.
A block away from the Ukrainian Museum – directly across the street from the St. George Ukrainian Catholic Church and adjacent St. George Academy high school, crowds gather outside McSorley’s Old Ale House, the oldest continuously operating bar in New York. Established in 1854, the watering hole – whose motto used to be “Good Ale, Raw Onions and No Ladies” – was one of the poet Walt Whitman’s favorites. McSorley’s denizens included several generations of New York bohemians, from e.e. cummings to Jack Kerouac to Woody Guthrie.
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The legendary Filmore East Theater, a venue made famous by Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers, was just around the corner from the current museum.
Two blocks from the original Ukrainian Museum on Second Avenue, the historic St. Mark’s Church became a magnet for the Beat Generation reading their poetry and musicians, like Patti Smith and Phillip Glass, appearing in its hallowed performance space.
And a short walk from the Ukrainian Museum, on the Bowery, is the New Museum specializing in cutting-edge contemporary art.
The Bowery used to be New York’s skid row. It was also the birthplace of punk rock, where CBGBs was located. Today it is lined with upscale hotels, boutiques, and restaurants for tourists who come to bask in New York’s cultural buzz.
From vyshyvanky to avant-garde
Since February 2024, everything related to Ukrainian culture has had to deal with the shock of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Cultural institutions have been no exception.
The original Ukrainian Museum was established in 1976 by the Ukrainian National Woman’s League of America under the direction of Maria Shust, on the upper floor of a tenement building that also housed the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. It was practically unknown outside the Ukrainian diaspora community.
In the 2000s, the museum moved to its current location, in a building designed by Ukrainian-American architect George Sawicki of Sawicki Tarella Architecture & Design.
After the Revolution of Dignity, the museum accelerated its outreach to the artistic community outside the Ukrainian diaspora. There were shows of young Ukrainian-American artists and readings with Ukrainian-American poets who wrote in English.
Over time, the building on Sixth Street, behind the St. George Church, has become the largest Ukrainian art museum outside Ukraine.
In 2022, shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion, Maria Shust retired, and Peter Doroshenko was chosen as the new director of the museum.
Doroshenko had previously been executive director at Dallas Contemporary Art Museum. Prior to that, he was the founding President of the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv, which opened in 2006.
“Directing the museum was not in my original career plans, but with the invasion and all the attention drawn to Ukraine and its culture, it seemed like that was my fate,” Doroshenko told Kyiv Post.
Doroshenko’s explicit mission is to bring the Ukrainian museum and Ukrainian art more widely to the public worldwide. “I wanted to go beyond pysanky and vyshyvanky,” he said, referring to the traditional folk art of intricately colored Easter eggs and embroidery.
Bringing Ukrainian art to the world
In an effort to go beyond New York and solidify Ukraine’s cultural legacy internationally, Doroshenko has set out to embrace Soviet and “Russian” artists who actually lived and worked in Ukraine, inspired by Ukrainian culture and traditions.
His approach has been two-pronged. On the one hand, he aimed to open up the museum to the vibrant culture of the neighborhood. On the other hand, he hoped to reclaim all the Ukrainian artists who have long been mistakenly considered Russians.
As a gesture to the local surroundings, Doroshenko once put together an exhibit featuring photographer Peter Hujar, a Ukrainian-American intimately linked to the East Village art scene in the 1960s and ’70s.
Doroshenko is currently working on a project with the Yara Arts Group, led by Virlana Tkacz – another pillar of the East Village’s thriving artistic community – which includes Serhiy Zhadan’s poetry, translated by Tkacz and Wanda Phipps.
There is also a solo exhibition of Alexandra Exter, dubbed the “avant-garde Amazon,” who lived and worked in Kyiv. Exter was a fixture in European artistic circles during the early 20th century, traversing Kyiv, Odesa, Paris, and Venice.
The collection of modern works includes masterpieces by David Burliuk and Alexander Archipenko that confirmed their contribution to the evolution of 20th-century art.
Future shows, intended to bring attention to Ukrainian artists whom most of the world still does not realize are Ukrainian, will involve Kazimir Malevich, Ilya Repin, and even ballet dancer Olga Picasso (the Spanish artist’s wife, née Khokhlova).
Apart from the exhibitions, the museum holds courses in Ukrainian language, embroidery, and other crafts. It has also hosted panel discussions on the controversial issue of decolonization as it pertains to Ukrainian art.
The hope is that by making people in the heart of the world’s art capital more aware of Ukraine’s contribution to the development of contemporary art, there will be a ripple effect that raises Ukrainian culture from merely “provincial” – as many of those who parrot Russian propaganda like to claim – to its rightful place in the history of modern and contemporary art.
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