Stories from Storage

Nearly 100 years ago, the Ukrainian artist, architect, and ethnographer Konstantyn Moshchenko went beyond simply making two-dimensional reproductions of the patterns of the Ukrainian wax-resist decorated eggs known as pysanky, but he created original miniature artworks inspired by those patters. Hear master pysanka artist and scholar Sofika Zielyk talk about these fascinating watercolors.

This slideshow features items from the scene of the protest that tell a tiny part the story of those protestors who braved the cold winter weather in downtown Kyiv to demand a better future.

While he is not a household name even among Ukrainian Americans, Nicholas Bervinchak was an important painter and print maker in the American Regionalist and Social Realist style, as well as a church muralist in the heavily Western-influenced Byzantine style popular among immigrants from Austria-Hungary in the early 20th century.

In this video, guest speaker Michael Buryk tells not only the story of Bervinchak, but also one of more unusual works: a portrait of the Kyiv-born Hollywood movie actress Anna Sten, who starred in several films in the 1930s.

From 1974 to 1997, the Ukrainian American community of New Jersey and the surrounding area organized a festival at the Garden State Arts Center (later, the PNC Bank Arts Center) as part of the "Heritage Festival" series of the New Jersey Highway Authority under the auspices of the New Jersey Council of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America.

Beginning from a relatively small start in the 1970s, it reached its heyday in the 1980s before succumbing to low attendance and other issues in the 1990s.