Reception | Ukraine’s People Revealed + Demons, Prophets, and Détente

Professor of Art History Asen Kirin presents the traveling exhibition Ukraine’s People Revealed: Early Eighteenth Century Paintings from the Swedish National Museum, Stockholm alongside Demons, Prophets, and Détente, a ceramic installation by Professor Emeritus Richard N. Johnson in the Lamar Dodd School of Art Foundation Gallery on the occasion of a Symposium on Ukrainian Art at the neighboring Georgia Museum of Art from March 27-28, 2025.

The symposium, sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts through a Public Impact Grant and co-hosted by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Lamar Dodd School of Art, coincides with the exhibition The Awe of Ordinary Labors: 20th-Century Paintings from Ukraine, curated by Professor Kirin who serves as Parker Curator of Russian Art at the Georgia Museum of Art.

Ukraine’s People Revealed: Early Eighteenth Century Paintings from the Swedish National Museum, Stockholm and Demons, Prophets, and Détente will be on view through early April 2025. See details below on exhibition.

The exhibitions reception on March 27 will be followed by a lecture and reception at the museum:

5:30 – 6:30 p.m. Georgia Museum of Art, M. Smith Griffith Auditorium
Lecture, Nathaniel Knight (co-curator of “Ukraine’s People Revealed”), moderated by Asen Kirin

6:30 – 8:30 p.m. Georgia Museum of Art
Dinner reception and visit to the galleries to view “The Awe of Ordinary Labors” (by invitation)

For more details on the free symposium, visit this page.

About Ukraine’s People Revealed

The Division of Prints and Drawings of the Swedish National Museum, Stockholm contains a collection with just over 200 hand-painted costume drawings, images of the peoples of the former Russian Empire. The images are associated with the name of Friedrich Wilhelm Bergholtz (1699–1772), a collector who served as a tutor to the Grand Duke Petr Fedorovich, the future Peter III.

It is likely that the forty-eight extraordinary Ukrainian oils in this collection are related to the visit undertaken by the court of Empress Elizabeth (r.1741-1762) to Kyiv and the Kozelets estates of the influential Count Oleksiy Rozumovsky (1709-1771) in the summer of 1744. Within a few years of this politically significant visit, Elizabeth agreed to restore the Ukrainian Hetmanate to its formerly autonomous status and appoint Oleksiy’s younger brother Kyrylo (1728-1803) as Hetman. The reproduction images displayed in this exhibition are among the earliest known ethnographic depictions of Ukrainian society in all its range and diversity and have before been publicly displayed at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University.

The exhibit is curated by Nathaniel Knight (Seton Hall University) with Edward Kasinec (Hoover Institution at Stanford University & Harriman Institute at Columbia University), and Remy Chwae (Columbia University).