Famine-Genocide exhibit in Kyiv features U.S. investor's collection (12/11/05)

Famine-Genocide exhibit in Kyiv features U.S. investor's collection

by Zenon Zawada
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - Among the biggest contributors to the Famine-Genocide exhibit unveiled by President Viktor Yushchenko in Kyiv two weeks ago was Morgan Williams, a prominent Ukrainophile.

Mr. Williams spent the last eight years accumulating and organizing what is now the world's largest known private collection of Holodomor artwork. His collection consists of 300 items, including more than 100 posters and 35 paintings.

Having spent 25 years in international food system development, Mr. Williams said he was deeply affected when he began learning the details about the Holodomor.

His first trip to Ukraine was in 1992 and by 1995 all his professional work involved Ukraine, including investing and consulting.

"There were no photos from the Famine, and no one was allowed to write, publish, or paint anything about this up until 1988," Mr. Williams said. "The suppression of facts that took place is amazing, and everything exposing it was done outside of Ukraine."

Mr. Williams' exhibit was displayed between November 23 and 28 on the second floor of the Ukrayinskyi Dim on European Square in Kyiv. Mr. Yushchenko opened "The Bells of Remembrance" exhibit on its first day.

Among those pieces of artwork from his collection that most impressed the president, Mr. Williams said, was a poster titled, "And We Watched and Kept Silent." It portrays a black crow with red eyes picking at a red thread in Ukrainian embroidery, symbolizing death picking apart the fabric of Ukrainian society.

Posters became a popular form of Holodomor art between 1988 and 1993 largely because the industry that churned out the massive volumes of Soviet propaganda went bankrupt after the Soviet Union's collapse. With production means still intact and a cultural void to fill, poster artists began creating art about the Chornobyl disaster and the Holodomor of 1932-1933, Mr. Williams said.

Another poster impressing Mr. Yushchenko featured the slogan, "No One Wanted to Die" against a blue-and-yellow background, with wheat fields and crosses portrayed in the bottom half.

Mr. Williams' collection featured a lot of diaspora poster art, including two postcards printed in 1935 by Ukrainians in Germany. "It was the first visual expression of Ukrainian protesting the famine," he said of the postcards, which he found the postcards in a Ukrainian museum in Connecticut.

Other diaspora items included a program cover from a 1983 commemoration event organized by the Winnipeg branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (today known as the Ukrainian Canadian Congress), as well as a poster announcing the October 2, 1983 demonstration in Washington. With between 15,000 and 20,000 in attendance, the manifestation became one of the largest gatherings of Ukrainian Americans in history.

Among the most recognizable paintings in Mr. Williams' collection were those of Viktor Zaretskyi, the husband of murdered Soviet dissident Alla Horska; Kyiv artist Nina Marchenko, who painted four large oil canvas paintings depicting rural scenes of starvation; and the late Holodomor survivor Volodymyr Kutkin, who painted a somber scene of a crow sitting on a man who had died trying to escape from his village to the city.

Aside from Holodomor art, Mr. Williams also displayed 300 works of folk art to demonstrate what life was like in Ukrainian villages before the ruinous genocide perpetrated by Soviet authorities.

Mr. Williams used many of his own funds to compile his collection, a figure he declined to name. But he also received help and financial contributions from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A. the Ukrainian Federation of America and the Bahriany Foundation.

Mr. Williams was born November 26, 1939, in Kansas, a state that bears "a lot of similarities to Ukraine," he said. Between 1997 and 1999, he ran an agricultural development finance company. It folded when French banking firm Société Generale decided Ukraine was too risky an investment.

Since then, he has offered business and investment consulting services. He is currently director of government affairs for SigmaBleyzer, a private equity investment management company.

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