Art at the Institute

The Ukrainian Institute of America is pleased to present Confronting Catastrophes, an exhibition of paintings by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern. Acting as a miniature survey, this exhibition features past and new works reflecting on personal and communal feedback to the resistance, stamina, and suffering of the Ukrainian people. The artist uses parallels between the fate of the Ukrainians at war and of Jews during the Holocaust and the catastrophe that befell Jews on October 7. Such topical parallelism have become part of a widely accepted and cultural war-time discourse in Ukraine and beyond. This marks Petrovsky-Shtern’s third solo exhibition with the UIA.

Confronting Catastrophes displays a compelling evolution of Petrovsky-Shtern’s art, shaped by the tragedies of the 20th and 21st centuries. His narrative paintings combine memory, myth, and allegory, drawing on traditions from Renaissance masters, the avant-garde, and Ukrainian folk art. Balancing abstraction and figuration, his works confront war, devastation, and resilience while placing humanity at their center. Deeply rooted in Jewish cultural memory yet universal in scope, Petrovsky-Shtern’s art reflects both personal history and collective trauma. His layered identity as artist, scholar, and humanitarian underscores the transformative power of art amid catastrophe.

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University. He teaches a variety of courses that include early modern and modern Jewish history; Jewish material culture; history and culture of Ukraine; origins of Zionism; and Slavic-Jewish literary interaction.

He has published more than a hundred articles and eight books and edited volumes, three of them award-winning, including The Jews in the Russian Army: Drafted into Modernity (2008, 2nd ed. 2014); The Anti-Imperial Choice: the Making of the Ukrainian Jew (2009); Lenin’s Jewish Question (2010); Jew