Natalia Korobova, "Noon," 1970, Oil on canvas, Mead Art Museum. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.
Natalia Korobova, "Noon," 1970, Oil on canvas, Mead Art Museum. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.

Art Exhibition: “A Contentious Legacy: Paintings from Soviet Ukraine”
Through January 4, 2026
Amherst College
Amherst, Massachusetts
www.amherst.edu

From the organizers:

“A Contentious Legacy” engages with the visual culture of Soviet Ukraine and showcases paintings, which were created between the 1960s and 1980s and displayed at official state-sponsored exhibitions of the era. The project explores the stylistic diversity as well as universally Soviet and uniquely Ukrainian dimensions of this legacy. Its ambiguous position between art and propaganda prompts an examination of the extent of genuine expression and artistic integrity allowed by the state system of art production in Soviet Ukraine.

Soviet Ukraine art - Hryhorii Bonia, "Lenin in Shushenskoe Village," 1985, Oil on canvas. The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.
Hryhorii Bonia, “Lenin in Shushenskoe Village,” 1985, Oil on canvas. The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.

The exhibition marks the Mead’s inaugural presentation of paintings from the Maniichuk-Brady collection, acquired in 2020. Jurii Maniichuk was a Ukrainian American lawyer who lived and worked in Kyiv in the 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. As art from the Soviet period became obsolete in the newly independent Ukraine, many works—not only of minor artistic value but also top-tier ones—faced the risk of being lost, damaged or destroyed. Maniichuk made it his mission to preserve the finest pieces he could find across the country. With the help of expert art historians and critics, he acquired nearly 180 large-scale paintings that illustrated the thematic and stylistic diversity of the official art of late Soviet Ukraine. Today, the Mead hosts a portion of this collection, with the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens and the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis being other stewards. A Contentious Legacy brings together eleven paintings housed at the Mead with eight works traveling from Minneapolis.

Ivan Shapoval, "Morning of My City (Sumy)," 1975, Oil on canvas. Mead Art Museum. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.
Ivan Shapoval, “Morning of My City (Sumy),” 1975, Oil on canvas. Mead Art Museum. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.

The majority of the featured paintings were created by artists from places that have been severely affected by, or occupied during, the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the regions of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, and Donetsk. With the Soviet past being glorified and weaponized by the Russian government in its attempts to erase Ukraine’s identity, on the one hand, and many Soviet buildings and artworks being destroyed in Ukraine as collateral war damage, on the other hand, “A Contentious Legacy” reflects on the complex afterlives of this legacy in the present moment.

Soviet Ukraine art - Mykhailo Antonchyk, "Triumph of Women," 1965, Oil on canvas. The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.
Mykhailo Antonchyk, “Triumph of Women,” 1965, Oil on canvas. The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis. Gift of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection.

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