The Ukrainian Museum at 50: Special Guided Tour
[image: Halyna Mazepa, Dance, 1956, oil on board, featured in A Living Canvas exhibition]
To honour the 50th year of The Ukrainian Museum, founded by the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America and a cultural anchor in East Village, The Village Trip is delighted to offer a very special guided tour of two exhibitions: A Living Canvas, which follows the formal threads—Color, Form, Geometry, Figuration, Texture, Line, Black & White, and Ornamentation—that run through fine art and folk art; and The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet, New York City’s first retrospective of Zhanna Kadyrova, who opened this year’s Venice Biennale and is one of the most internationally acclaimed Ukrainian artists working today.
A Living Canvas: The Ukrainian Museum at 50 deconstructs the Museum’s permanent collection, which is customarily organized chronologically, so it becomes a thematic display. Paintings, kilims, rushnyky (embroidered ritual cloths), sculpture, historic costume, and folk objects are placed in conversation not by period or provenance, but by the aesthetic affinities that have always connected them. Thus, A Living Canvas demonstrates that, in Ukrainian art, the boundary between the artist’s studio and the village workshop was never as rigid as European academic tradition insisted. The woven kilim and the painted canvas share a formal intelligence. The embroidered rushnyky and the modernist composition speak the same visual language.
The Ground Shifts Beneath Our Feet brings together recent works made since the Russian invasion by Zhanna Kadyrova. Through sculpture, embroidery, video installation, photography, and film, Kadyrova investigates Earth as a site of violence, memory, and ecological resistance. Working at a monumental scale, Kadyrova finds the subtle within the catastrophic. Kadyrova is the recipient of the 2012 Kazimir Malevich Prize, the 2013 PinchukArtCentre Grand Prize, and the 2025 Taras Shevchenko National Prize in Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Castello di Rivoli, Ludwig Museum Budapest, and Kunstverein Hannover.