NEW YORK – Co-curators Myroslava M. Mudrak and Tetiana Rudenko received the 2016 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections and Exhibitions for the catalogue “Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s,” which accompanied the exhibition of the same name organized by The Ukrainian Museum in New York in cooperation with the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema Arts of Ukraine in Kyiv. The exhibit had been shown at The Ukrainian Museum on February 15-October 4, 2015.
The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship was established in 1980 in honor of the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art and scholar of early 20th century painting. This award is presented to the author or authors of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in the English language under the auspices of a museum, library or collection. In 2009, the College Art Association (CAA) established a second Barr award for the authors of catalogues produced by smaller museums, libraries and collections with an annual operating budget of less than $10 million.
The 2016 award covers catalogues published between September 1, 2014, and August 31, 2015.
Prof. Mudrak accepted the juried award for herself and on behalf of Ms. Rudenko at a ceremony that took place during the convocation at the 104th annual conference in Washington on February 3, that was led by DeWitt Godfrey, president of the CAA board of directors. Olha Ivanova, counselor for cultural affairs at the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States, attended the ceremony and participated in the award presentation.
Prof. Mudrak thanked the association and members of the jury for the recognition and used the occasion to point out the larger implications of the award, especially drawing the public’s attention to the current situation in Ukraine as it struggles to realign itself with Western values.
“There are parallels to be drawn between the 1920s, as covered by our exhibition, and the threat of regression faced by the current forces of politics. Then, an entire generation was lost to Stalin’s cleansing; our exhibition, drawn from the largest collection of Ukrainian theater design in the world, sought to honor their unfettered artistic spirit,” she said.
Prof. Mudrak thanked the staff and the board of The Ukrainian Museum, especially its director, Maria Shust, for their tireless efforts in producing quality exhibits. She also thanked Lidia Lykhach of Rodovid Press for her cooperation in the production of the catalogue.
The jury consisting of David Dearinger, Boston Athenaeum, (chair); Kelly Baum, Princeton University Art Museum; Alison de Lima Green, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Peter Sturman, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Thayer Tolles, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; cited the pioneering qualities of research presented in the catalogue and underscored its revelatory significance, as it brought to light an understudied and often overlooked chapter of European Modernism.
The jury also pointed out that one of the achievements of the contributors’ scholarship on the Ukrainian avant-garde of the first decades of the 20th century is that it makes clear that “these artists, filmmakers, dancers, scenographers, theater directors and costume designers deserve to be considered alongside their better known counterparts in the Paris and the Russian avant-gardes. ‘Staging the Ukrainian Avant-Garde of the 1910s and 1920s’ stands as a model of the rich insights to be gained from interdisciplinary, cross media investigations that are grounded in the study of primary documents and concrete social history.”
Ms. Mudrak is professor emerita, Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University. She has curated many exhibitions and authored a number of books, the most recent one being the catalogue of The Ukrainian Museum’s exhibition “Borys Kosarev. Modernist Kharkiv 1915-1931” (Rodovid Press, 2011). She studies Modernism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in relation to philosophical and stylistic developments of the West.
Ms. Rudenko is chief collections manager of the Museum of Theater, Music and Cinema Arts of Ukraine in Kyiv. Among her other publications is a co-authored book on Anatol Petrytsky titled “Anatol Petrytskyi. Teatralni Stroyi ta Dekoratsiyi zi Zbirky Muzeyu Teatralnoho, Muzychnoho ta Kinomystetstva Ukrainy” (2012).