President Volodymyr Zelensky visits New York’s Ukrainian Museum, calls for ‘the decolonisation of Ukrainian art’

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, on Monday (23 September) reinforced the importance of defending Ukrainian culture by officially opening Alexandra Exter: The Stage is a World at the city’s Ukrainian Museum, which recently hired Kyiv-based art historian Oksana Semenik as researcher to combat Russian cultural disinformation and decolonise Ukrainian art.

Zelensky met with Ukrainian Americans at the museum, founded in 1976 by the Ukrainian Women’s League of America in the East Village’s Little Ukraine. Museum director Peter Doroshenko led a tour for him and First Lady Olena Zelenska.

Semenik’s Ukrainian Art History feed on X (formerly Twitter), launched after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has become a go-to resource about Ukrainian artists whose work has been appropriated or destroyed by Russia, or who were killed by Soviet assaults on Ukrainian culture, including dictator Joseph Stalin’s Holodomor mass starvation and Great Terror.

In social media posts about their visit, the Zelenskys wrote that “it is important to return to Ukraine the artists appropriated by Russia” since “culture is our mental space”. They cited the cultural campaign following the full-scale invasion when “for the first time, the world's leading museums finally rightly signed the works of [Ivan] Aivazovsky, [Arkhip] Kuindzhi, and Malevich with their true, Ukrainian origin.”

“Today we continue the decolonisation of Ukrainian art in New York,” the Zelenskys wrote. “The Ukrainian Museum presents our modernist and avant-garde artists to the United States and visitors from all over the world precisely as Ukrainian, not Russian or Soviet, as the empire has positioned them for years.”

Exter’s first comprehensive North American solo show traces the avant-garde pioneer’s formative years in Kyiv, influenced by Ukrainian folk art. It focuses on the period from 1913 to 1934, her early avant-garde compositions and theatre art, and Martian costume designs for Aelita, Queen of Mars, a seminal Soviet silent film. She had an “almost renaissance woman approach to art making”, says Doroshenko.

The exhibition of more than 60 paintings and works on paper came together via loans from San Antonio’s McNay Art Museum, the University of Texas, Austin and international private collections and collaborations with Ukrainian museums. Two collectors with family ties to Russia pulled out over safety concerns.

Exter was born in 1882 in Białystok (now Poland), and spent years in Ukraine. An early Soviet-era stint at the Vkhutemas school in Moscow pegged her in Russian art historiography as a Russian artist. In 1924, Exter and her husband emigrated to France, where she knew Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Gertrude Stein.

“She was first of all very important in terms of connecting and being a bridge between Ukrainian folk art of the 19th century and the Ukrainian avant-garde and all the artists,” says Doroshenko. “That story hasn’t really been told. It’s an important one, because right now a lot of the avant-garde artists, it’s almost as if they were born out of Venus’s head. There’s no grounding there. But there’s definitely a grounding that comes from Ukrainian folk art. I think that’s an important aspect to Exter’s work. Even on her death in Paris in 1949, numerous friends came to her flat. She decorated it as if it was a small village room in Ukraine with vyshyvanki and pillows and various ceramic works.”

The museum’s trilingual (Ukrainian, English and French) exhibition catalogue, published in Ukraine , seeks to set the record straight. Doroshenko told The Art Newspaper in July: “Everything for the last 150 years that’s Ukrainian has been assimilated into Russian culture.” To avoid confusion, for now the museum uses the generally accepted spelling of Exter’s name, which is Oleksandra in proper Ukrainian transliteration.

Exter’s life in Ukraine and inspiration from Ukrainian traditional art is “usually a blind spot for curators and art historians” influenced by Russian narratives, Semenik wrote by email from Kyiv last month. “I believe this happens because most of them use the information from the Russian art monographs, that were translated into English and widely spread through Western academia.”

Semenik adds: “I’ve seen many books like this in the US university and museum libraries by myself. With no mention that Kyiv or Odesa are Ukrainian cities, or that the ‘folk art that she was inspired by’ is Ukrainian folk art.” Works by Malevich, Exter and other Suprematist artists were rendered as embroidery by Ukrainian village artists and exhibited “even before the legendary 0,10 exhibition where for the first time Black Square was shown,” she says.

Doroshenko and Semenik worked together in Kyiv in August on archival research for upcoming exhibitions about Ukraine folk art’s influence on modernism and about Vladimir Tatlin, who had Ukrainian roots but is widely regarded as a Russian avant-garde pioneer.

Tatlin’s three years as a teacher at the Kyiv Art Institute, ignored in previous studies of his life, were the artist’s “most fruitful and exciting time”, Doroshenko said recently from Kyiv. He was amazed both by the city’s vibrant wartime cultural and intellectual life and the extent of the Soviet-era decimation, both physical and ideological, of its archives.

“It’s taken me and Oksana Semenik literally two or three months just to come up with a partial list of Tatlin students at the art institute,” he said. “The institute has no files. I’m coming across this research from newspaper articles written about the institute. That’s kind of crazy that a major art school doesn’t have lists of their past students.” Ukraine, he added, is the “Wild West of art historical research”.

• Alexandra Exter: The Stage is a World, 27 September-19 January 2025, Ukrainian Museum, New York