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• 1 /media/physical-exhibit-outside.jpg 2023-04-01T16:27:46-04:00 Introduction and overview 73 image_header 2023-06-19T20:40:20-04:00
  Welcome to the Ukrainian History and Education Center's exhibition "Depicting Genocide: 20th Century Responses to the Holodomor"
  
  This exhibition exists in both an in-person physical installation, and as this full-scale online version. The in-person version opened on June 4, 2023 and will remain on view through October 2023. If you find yourself within travelling range of our location in central New Jersey, we urge you to come and visit the physical exhibition: many of the artworks presented can only be fully appreciated by viewing them in person.
  
  "Depicting Genocide" opens during the 90th anniversary of the Holodomor. It also opens as Russia continues its war of aggression against Ukraine, during which genocide is is yet again being perpetrated.
  
  This exhibition explores some of the ways in which the Holodomor was depicted during the 20th century, particularly though art. The artistic depiction of genocide is challenging. Should horrors be depicted directly and graphically — with skeletons or dead bodies? Or should the approach be more understated, providing the viewers or readers with just enough to allow them to create the images of horror in their own minds? This exhibition explores the extremely varied approaches that artists over more than seven decades have used to tackle the Holodomor.
  
  While many artists and writers were quick to create a substantial body of work about other genocides (such as the Holocaust), depictions of the Holodomor were remarkably sparse prior to the last decade of the 20th century. The Ukrainian History and Education Center is honored to have a significant number of these early works in its permanent collection, and this exhibition is built around those items. The exhibition also includes period primary sources that shed light on the Holodomor as a historical event, how it was portrayed in the press, and how Ukrainians in the diaspora responded to it.

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• 1 media/kowalenko.JPG 2023-05-23T16:45:45-04:00 Andrij Kowalenko 16 plain 2023-07-20T21:19:19-04:00

  "Holodomor"

  
  This large canvas, with its anthropomorphic shapes in black, gray, blues, and golds, and with faces reminiscent of Picasso's "Guernica", is perhaps the Ukrainian American artist Andrij Kowalenko's most aggressively cubist work.
  
  Although it is superficially very different from the other works in this exhibition, it shares a common visual language. The faces staring out at the viewer are not unlike the eyeless screaming face of Cymbal's "The Year 1933", and the mass of figures are an echo of the tangled heap of bodies at the base of Dmytrenko's "One Can Go Mad". The effect is heightened through the angular and jagged placement of the figures that echo the contorted figures in Dmytrenko's "1933" and Pevny's "Zemlia".
  
  We are not sure of the exact title that the artist originally gave to this work. "Holodomor" — the title we use here — is what was given in the catalog of the retrospective exhibition of Kowalenko's works presented by the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago in 2009-2010. The original title must have been something different, as the term "Holodmor" did not come into use until several decades after the creation of the painting in 1967. Regardless, this work has always been closely associated with the genocidal famine in Ukraine.

  About the artist

  
  Andrij Kowalenko was born in the city of Zaporizhzhia on October 17, 1913. He was fascinated by art from a young age, particularly by the shapes and decorations produced at the pottery shop located near his home. He completed his secondary education in Zaporizhzhia and attended the Art Academy there. As a city resident, he was not impacted by the Holodomor to the extent that people in the villages were, but he probably faced hunger, was aware of the horrors in the countryside, and certainly would have experienced the repressive anti-Ukrainian policies of the Stalin period.
  
  Along with untold thousands of other refugees, Kowalenko made his way west with the retreating German army, ending up in the Displaced Person camp in Raitersaich east of Nuremberg. He was active in the artistic life of the Ukrainian community there, creating stage designs for the theater group and an iconostasis for the Orthodox church, and taught art classes. In 1947 he moved to Liège, Belgium to study at the St. Luke School of Art.
  
  Thanks to a sponsorship from a family member, Kowalenko was able to resettle in the United States in 1956. He made his home in the Ukrainian American community of Chicago, where he would spend the rest of his life. He continued his artistic work, including the painting of portraits and other commissions from community members.
  
  Kowalenko's training in the Socialist Realism of the Soviet Union and the conservative traditionalism of the St. Luke School evolved into his earliest individual style influenced by Cezanne. After his arrival in the United States, his paintings became more sparse, used greater color contrasts, and adopted a more abstract, cubist style. In the 1980s, he began experimenting with found objects, creating mysterious, icon-like works from bottle caps, wood, metal, cardboard, and other discarded materials.
  
  Kowalenko participated in joint exhibitions with the Chicago "Monolith" group of Ukrainian American artists, had solo exhibitions in 1975, 1977, and 1980, and was the subject of an exhibition at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in 1986. He died in Chicago on February 28, 1989. His work was presented at a major retrospective exhibition in 2009 at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, which has a significant number of his works in its permanent collection.