Founded in 1971 by Dr. Achilles and Vera Chreptowsky, Konstantin Milonadis and Mychajlo Urban and located in the heart of Ukrainian Village in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, UIMA is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American abstract and minimalist works from the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Much of the progressive and iconoclastic art created in the 1970s and 80s in Ukraine was suppressed or destroyed by the Soviets, and the artists were blacklisted or jailed. Guided by our founding curator Wasyl Kacurovsky, UIMA’s permanent collection has assembled work by artists whose careers extend far beyond Ukraine to global capitals of modern and contemporary art such as Paris, New York, and Chicago.

The permanent collection encompasses a half century of art and offers sections devoted to real and imagined landscapes, figure and form, color and structure, as well as memory and myth. Many of the artists represented have world-class reputations, and their works can also be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the Barnes Collection. Included in the collection is the work of Europe’s first cubist sculptor, Alexander Archipenko, and avant-garde artists Alexis Gritchenko and Mychajlo Andreenko, who fled Ukraine for France during the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Art, however, is more than a historical record or demonstration of masterful techniques. Art registers and expresses the experiences of nations and people. More than 70,000 Ukrainians and Ukrainian-Americans live in the Chicagoland area. Art helps to broker, interrogate, grieve and celebrate with communities that have experienced exile and immigration; and it helps to document and articulate their new lives as they build again. UIMA has served as this important hub of connection and examination for Chicago’s Ukrainian community and, by parallel, many of the City’s immigrant populations. UIMA continues to promote and produce exhibitions by local, national and international artists.