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20 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЛИСТОПАД 2015 Speech by Adrienne Kochman at the Opening of the Exhibit The Ukrainian Diaspora: Women Artists, 1908-2015 at the Ukrainian Museum in New York (October 18, 2015) The Ukrainian Diaspora: Women Artists, 1908-2015 is the first major exhibition to examine the relationship between Ukrainian identity and women artists beyond the borders of geographic Ukraine. It features over 100 works by 43 artists, primarily from North America, where the largest artist population resides, but also from Europe. The majority of the artists belong to the third wave of immigration that occurred after World War II, when the loss of childhood home and country had to be negotiated in a new host land, and where cultural identity, community, and gender roles were redefined and transformed. These artists were either born in Ukraine before the war or born abroad into the 1960s. Also included are artists predating the third immigration wave whose work had matured or was already emerging by the time of World War II. Sonia Delaunay belongs to this group and represents the 1908 date in the exhibi- tion’s title with her first exhibition at the Galerie Notre-Dame des Champs in Paris that year. Several art- ists of the post-Soviet-era fourth immigration wave appear in the show as well. Among the artists represented, adherence to their Ukrainian cultural identity is paradoxically simple and complex. While they would arguably agree that they are tied to it, the depth of that connec- tion and its relevance to their personal lives, work, and relationships manifests itself in profoundly dif- ferent ways, and is influenced as much by life circumstances as it is by the audience for whom they are creating their art. It may also change over time. The Ukrainian Diaspora: Women Artists, 1908-2015 thus endeavors to present a broad range of works, illustrating multiple pathways with which artists have chosen to articulate, transform, hybridize, or seemingly disengage from this sensibility. Some works di- rectly assert a connection to Ukrainian themes, representational forms, and historical events. These in- clude Yaroslava Surmach Mills’ reverse glass paintings of Ukrainian folk life and ritual traditions, and Christina Kudryk’s painting The Promised Land (2011), from her Heritage series, addressing one’s past immigration experience, as well as her Maidan (2014), expressing shock and anguish at the protests and massacre in Kyiv’s Maidan Square during the winter of 2013-2014, just as Yulia Pinkusevich re-created its chaos in Silencing the Cacophony (2015). Many more works resist such clear relationships, occupying a realm of visual engagement rich with multiple cultural associations, including (but not exclusively) Ukrainian. Those familiar with Ukrainian embroidery and its history would likely recognize a link be- tween the hunter green, black, orange, and red color palette commonly used in regions of Western Ukraine and a similar color range in Lialia Kuchma’s small tapestry, Extract (2010), although clear ref- erences between the Ukrainian association and its final manifestation are not explicitly put forth within the artwork itself. Nor would viewers be aware that Extract previously existed in the shape of an oblong ritual cloth— similar to a Ukrainian rushnyk —and was later changed to meet new aesthetic interests. The purpose of the exhibition is to expand notions of “Ukrainianness” in art beyond its typical as- sociations with traditional folk art as a woman’s practice. Most artists in the exhibition are over the age of 50 and experienced a number of the issues that many women artists faced during the women’s libera- tion movement. These issues included mediating a masculinized art mainstream that diminished or ex- cluded ethnics just as it did women, and making a conscious decision to pursue the contemporary aes- thetic agendas traditionally associated with male art practice, such as welded sculpture and formalist painting. In addition, many artists had to come to terms personally with the diaspora’s emphasis on tra- ditional art as the most effective way of preserving Ukrainian identity. Multiple types of artwork are included in the exhibition, illustrating the range of media and sub- jects, styles, and aesthetic ideas with which these artists have worked. These include icon painting; the traditional academic genres of still life, portraiture, and landscape; figurative sculpture; abstract paint- ing; tapestry; and mixed-media works. In an effort to communicate aesthetic flexibility and the individu- alized nature of identity, artworks illustrating an engagement with dual identities—Ukrainian and west- ern modernist—are also represented. Their diversity is intended to widen the narrative of what it means to be a woman artist of the Ukrainian diaspora, and not simply a woman artist who happens to be a Ukrainian diasporan. Adrienne Kochman/Adrijana Kochman
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