Lecture by Myroslava M. Mudrak

Reclaiming Ukraine’s Art for History

Thursday, December 17, 2025, 12:00-1:15pm New York Time

Myroslava M. Mudrak (Ohio State University)

As we come to the end of a celebratory period marking the 30th anniversary of SHERA’s founding, Myroslava Mudrak takes a retrospective look at the circumstances of her own professional trajectory in what remains a rare fied field of art historical study: modern Ukrainian art. Russia’s assault on a sovereign neighbour state has brought world attention to Ukraine and an occasion to shed light on the country’s distinctive culture, separate from Russia. Since independence in 1991, contemporary Ukrainian artists have focused on reclaiming their identity long dominated by Russian design. In the spirit of a new global awareness about Ukraine, Mudrak will present the ways her own work has related to this reclamation process.

Myroslava Maria Mudrak (Emerita Professor of History of Art) taught courses on modernist art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at The Ohio State University since 1982. She has curated shows of Ukrainian modernist art and contributed to exhibition catalogues, most recently, In the Eye of the Storm. Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s shown in Madrid, Vienna, and London over 2023 and 2024. She served as curator and primary catalogue essayist for several exhibitions of Ukrainian modernism at The Ukrainian Museum in New York, including “Nikifor: The Ultimate Outsider” (2023); “Borys Kosarev. Modernist Kharkiv 1915-1931” (2011); and “Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s” (2015) recognized in 2016 by the Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions under the auspices of the College Art Association. Mudrak’s seminal publication, New Generation and Artistic Modernism in Ukraine (1986), was published in a Ukrainian translation by Rodovid Press in 2018. More recently, Prof. Mudrak published The Imaginative World of Heorhii Narbut and the Making of a Ukrainian Brand (Kyiv, Rodovid Press, 2020), available in Ukrainian and French translations (2021). In 2020, Mudrak was elected as a Foreign Member to the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine.

IMAGE CREDIT: Oleh Tistol and Mykola Matsenko. “Together Forever.” 2013.