WASHINGTON – The University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation began a five-month exhibition and associated events focusing on the process of creating a public U.S. memorial and, in particular, the work of one of its prominent graduates: the designer, architect and sculptor of the National Holodomor Memorial in our nation’s capital – Larysa Kurylas.
The Holodomor was Stalin’s infamous Famine-Genocide that killed at least 4 million Ukrainians in 1932-1933.
The exhibit opened at the architecture school’s Kibel Gallery on February 12 with a presentation session featuring Ms. Kurylas, and statements by Volodymyr Yelchenko, the ambassador to the United States from Ukraine, which financed the construction of this memorial; and Metropolitan-Archbishop Borys Gudziak, leader of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in the United States.
Beginning her presentation that afternoon, Ms. Kurylas noted that she asked the organizer of the exhibit what she should focus on and was told “to focus on what I was best qualified to answer, that is, what made the design of the Holodomor Memorial what it is.”
Chritine Syzonenko
The Holodomor Memorial designed by Larysa Kurylas that was unveiled in Washington in 2015.
And the artistic design, as most visitors see it, is that of a field of wheat appearing wholesome on the left side of the monument and gradually disappearing as it proceeds to the other end.
Growing up as a daughter of post-World War II immigrant parents, “my Ukrainian and American worlds happily existed side-by-side,” Ms. Kurylas said. “Never – in a million years – did I think that I would be involved in a project that would overlap the ‘ethnic’ Ukrainian and the ‘professional’ American sides of my life so meaningfully.”
With the support of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and the Embassy of Ukraine, the U.S. Congress passed a bill, which President George W. Bush signed in 2006, authorizing the government of Ukraine to “establish a memorial to victims of the Ukrainian Famine-Genocide of 1932-1933 on federal land in the District of Columbia.”
The location selected is on a small triangular lot on Massachusetts Avenue, North Capital Street and F Street NW. It is near Union Station, a short walking distance from the U.S. Capitol building and the Victims of Communism Memorial, and two miles south along Massachusetts Avenue from the Taras Shevchenko monument.
Ironically, just behind the Holodomor Memorial along F Street, there are two popular restaurants: the Dubliner Restaurant and Pub and the Irish Times Pub, which has a sign above its entrance stating: “Give me your thirsty, your famished, your befuddled masses.”
As Ms. Kurylas pointed out, when Ukraine achieved its independence in 1991 after the break-up of the Soviet Union, its first Holodomor memorial in Kyiv was built in 1993 on St. Michael’s Square. In the United States, the building of the first memorial began in the 1950s at the church of the Ukrainian Orthodox cemetery in South Bound Brook, N.J.
“So, I asked myself, what form would a memorial take,” Ms. Kurylas continued, that is “dedicated to the victims of a secret famine deliberately created in Ukraine, but built in Washington, D.C., 80 years later on a small triangular site next to two restaurants?”
Chosen to be the artistic designer of the memorial, Ms. Kurylas said, “I began to wonder how one might actually memorialize the Holodomor. Three challenges struck me immediately: resolving the geometry of the triangular lot, mitigating the uncomfortable proximity … of the Dubliner Restaurant and the Irish Times Pub and – more philosophically and theoretically – how would one actually convey the idea of a deliberate famine in built form?”
And when the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced its five-week international “blitz competition” for the design of the Memorial, “as a Ukrainian American architect with this important project happening in my backyard, I felt duty-bound to participate,” Ms. Kurylas related.
What do Americans know about Ukraine, she asked herself, and she answered: “If they know anything, it is that Ukraine was the ‘Breadbasket of Europe,’ a fact that was taught in schools across America.” That is why the main sculpture of the memorial is the “Field of Wheat.”
She characterized that depiction of the wheat as “dynamic”: “It changes from high relief on the left edge to deep negative relief on the right, reflecting the transition from a record harvest to a horrible deficit.”
And, as it disappears on the right side, the words “Holodomor 1932-1933” emerge, as does a short paragraph explaining that term and the basic facts about Stalin’s genocide.
The sculpture of the wheat is made of bronze. It faces Massachusetts Avenue; behind the rear of the memorial along F Street, a number of Redbud trees help block the view of the two restaurants.
The Ukrainian Embassy hired Hartman-Cox Architects to handle the construction.
An interesting personal part of Ms. Kurylas’s story concerned getting some harvested wheat in July 2012, which could no longer be done in the United States. But she remembered that her mother’s relative had a wheat farm in Canada, where they harvested their wheat the “old-fashioned way – by hand.”
So she and her mother drove three days there (and three days back) to Uncle Mike Kaminsky’s farm in Manitoba to pick up four sheaves of wheat that he had dried and bundled.
It took 17 bronze castings to create the wheat field. And finally, on August 4, 2015, many months after the site preparation began, and only two months before the scheduled dedication ceremony, the five-ton sculpture traveled down I-95, was craned off the truck and bolted into the memorial site.
Ms. Kurylas recalled the historic event on that November 7, 2015, overcast grey day, when 5,000 Ukrainian Americans gathered on Columbus Circle in front of Union Station to dedicate the nearby Holodomor Memorial. Ukraine’s First Lady Maryna Poroshenko, whose husband, Petro Poroshenko, was elected president after the Euro-Maidan revolution in 2013, attended the dedication.
In the conclusion of her presentation, Ms. Kurylas noted that not all who visit the Holodomor Memorial today “understand the symbolism of the abstract void in the structure, as representing the nature of the Famine and the tragic loss of life.”
“Nevertheless, almost everyone has found some meaning in the Holodomor Memorial, so I feel that it has met the most basic and important requirement of memorials,” she said.
Another gallery talk with Ms. Kurylas, representatives of Hartman-Cox Architects, Forrester Construction and a co-sculptor from Laran Bronze Foundry was scheduled for March 2. Columnist and historian Anne Applebaum, the author of “Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine,” will deliver a keynote address and participate in a panel discussion with experts on other historic mass famines on April 1.
Also in April, a screening is planned of the new film “Mr. Jones” about the Welsh Journalist Gareth Jones’s successful secret attempt to report on the Holodomor in Ukraine while reporting from the Soviet Union.