Ukrainian Resilience as Resistance: How Artist Maya Hayuk Is Leaning into Her Heritage

Oktoberfest was winding down in Cincinnati. The last schnitzel sandwich specials were selling out at Paycor Stadium during Monday night’s loss to the Washington Commanders. One day prior, revelers filing into the city from Covington crossed the old blue Roebling Bridge in dirndls and lederhosen; twenty-four hours later, defeated fans returned to Kentucky in black and orange, picking up their cars from the discounted parking lots along the waterfront. But high above them, another cultural celebration was underway. The Ukrainian-American artist Maya Hayuk was plotting her latest mural overhead, on the side of the Northern Kentucky Convention Center, her work equal parts alarm bell and homage to her ravaged ancestral homeland. Hayuk’s project was delayed until she returned from an impromptu trip to Lviv this summer, where she saw firsthand a people who would not, could not accept their losses three years into the Russian invasion.

The Covington mural, eye-popping abstract geometry at first glance, takes its inspiration from Ukrainian folk handcrafts, including embroidery and egg dyeing. It’s a practice the 55-year-old Brooklyn artist has maintained for nearly two decades—she conquered Wynwood in 2013, and the Bowery Wall in 2014—decades after being taught decorative arts by her grandmothers while simultaneously developing a nascent passion for drawing. Her murals are an impassioned celebration of the delicate nature of women’s work that today doubles as a metaphor for the fragility of Ukrainian society in the face of three years of foreign aggression.

There’s no confusion about Hayuk’s intention when you meet her in person, as I did at Sudova, a new Ukrainian restaurant in downtown Cincinnati, after a series of near misses while we both independently explored the contemporary art scene in Ukraine earlier this year.

“I knew some people in real life that I met on my first visit in 1989, but I mostly hung out with artists I met through Instagram that I had never met before, and on my first morning there, I attended a nude drawing class at Ya Gallery, which was the most grounding thing I could have done, so I started hanging out there every Saturday and soon there was a crew of us,” Hayuk recalled. “Two weeks turned to a month, and one month turned to two, and by then, I knew I couldn’t leave before Ukrainian Independence Day at the end of August.”

The Ukrainian diaspora is everywhere, and in retrospect, Hayuk believed the Ukrainian summer camps she attended outside Cleveland, Ohio, helped prepare her for her latest return to the country her parents fled in 1944. “The Soviets cut up the house where my mother grew up west of Lviv; my parents knew what the other side looked like. They wanted to maintain their heritage and history and they sent me scouting every summer. They knew one day we were going to have to fight for our homeland; we just didn’t know in what capacity.”

At dinner, before we broke bread—sourdough rye with honey butter and spring onions—at the chef’s own grandmother’s table, Hayuk introduced herself by handing out pocketbook-sized red and black stickers unambiguously emblazoned with the words “Russia is a Terrorist State.”

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Green borscht with stewed chicken and a side of caramelized cabbage and onion in brown butter made a welcome respite for Hayuk and her crew, whose work has been in high demand since Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022. In the immediate aftermath, as control of Kyiv was being contested from all directions, Hayuk embarked on an international tour installing murals around the world like she was plastering stickers on lampposts, painting in bold nationalist blues and yellows that evoked both flag and tryzub—the post-Cold War trident and coat of arms meant to represent the country as it came out from behind the Iron Curtain. Variations on the theme are now visible everywhere from Oostende, Belgium, to Benjamin Cardozo High School in Queens, where Hayuk contributed a mural to the Branded Arts Festival alongside wall-sized compositions by Daniel Arsham, Futura and OSGEMEOS.

This past summer, Hayuk returned to Ukraine for the first time in more than three decades. She spent three months in Lviv, the westernmost big city and cultural capital of Ukraine. She made the trip with the intention of settling affairs at an apartment her mother kept there but soon found herself engaged in a depleted-but-hungry contemporary art community filling a void left by classical institutions, including the Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum, began emptying out their collections of historic artworks and artifacts on February 24, 2022, and shipping them off to western Europe where some paintings have found new life in touring exhibitions like “In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine,” which closed last month at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

“I discovered a new institution, the Lviv Municipal Art Center through artist friends in the city; it’s a space for bright, young experiments in art–history, activism, film, music, performance–and has electricity for when there are blackouts, which happen all the time,” Hayuk told me. “They have an initiative connecting artists with wounded soldiers, which was what interested me so much I conducted a workshop with artists and warriors.”

It was Hayuk’s first time in Lviv since 1989, when she was accepted in an International Sister City program, facilitated by Johns Hopkins University–in Odesa. “Baltimore and Odesa are sister cities, both being port cities, but it wasn’t a typical exchange program, “ Hayuk explained; “they didn’t allow anyone to leave the USSR to study in the United States, and it was specifically tailored for young Ukrainian-Americans to learn about Ukrainian literature, culture and history. Unfortunately, it was taught in Russian, so we bailed. A few friends and I got train tickets to Lviv, which was completely inaccessible at the time.”

Hayuk made fast friends with young artists, actors and activists, some of whom she called on in Lviv this summer, none more famous than the poet-rocker Taras Chubay, who was a student at the Lviv Conservatory when he and Hayuk first met. “He’s an incredible musician, but he’s been in hiding since the beginning of the invasion. His recording studio and house have been destroyed by the Russians, his guitars stolen, but he is still alive,” Hayuk said.

By the time Hayuk returned stateside to prepare for Covington, the energy across Ukraine had shifted. What felt like a summer of love, with locals pouring out of the cities for uninterrupted beach and mountain holidays, came to an abrupt end as Russian forces resumed a near-daily bombardment across the country; a single day could bring a barrage of more than 200 drones and missiles.

But that hasn’t stopped more international artists from following in Hayuk’s footsteps. On October 29th, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation awarded its 7th biannual Future Generation Art Prize at the PinchukArtCentre in Kyiv. This year’s $100,000 prize, awarded to an international artist under 35 years old, was awarded to Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman who traveled to Kyiv to accept the prize on a day that saw drone attacks near the city center. Rahman’s multidisciplinary practice examines how women have been historically silenced by society. Her works will be on display at the PinchukArtCentre until January 19, 2025, the day before the inauguration of Donald Trump, which will mark the next chapter in Ukraine’s uncertain future.

Hayuk’s Covington mural is not the only merger of Ukrainian art and architecture on display in Kentucky right now. A gallery at the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville is currently dedicated to a series of white-on-white silkscreens by queer Amsterdam-based Ukrainian artist Anton Shebetko, recently shortlisted for the 2025 PinchukArtCentre Prize awarded to a Ukrainian artist under 35 years old. His current series of works examines the crumbled remains of Unesco heritage sites across his native country. “In the first iteration of the work, there was also a list of all destroyed and damaged objects of cultural heritage by Russia. The series itself was not only about being reminiscent of what’s lost but also posed a question of why it wasn’t seen and known as well as what the role of culture was during the war,” Shebetko told Observer.  On a recent visit, 21C Museum curator Alice Gray Stites suggested examining the pictures from side to side as natural light reflects on the ink at an angle, an action representative of the struggle to remember what was lost, but I couldn’t help thinking they were best witnessed with the flash of my iPhone, an action that captures the speed with which the sudden violence transpired.

A daily tragedy of the current conflict is the way in which architecture across the country has suffered; martial law has prevented citizen activists from publicly protesting the quiet erasure of landmark buildings that are being acquired and demolished without permits after suffering the slightest scarring by developers who sweep in to erect modern buildings, including luxury residences and members clubs, that will dot a post-war landscape. Shebetko pointed to online activists devoting their attention to saving one building at a time, like save.kvitny.ukrainy, which recently shined a light on a new owner’s plans to raze an outdoor summer theater walled with mosaics believed to depict the Lesya Ukrainka’s 1911 play The Forest Song. This past July, the Kyiv Independent reported on the razing of Zelensky Manor, a late 19th-century merchant home that is one of Kyiv’s last remaining original wooden houses. Its destruction was the most egregious since the previous summer’s teardown of a 200-year-old home in the city’s historic Podil neighborhood.

The same bureaucracy that failed to save those buildings in Kyiv also prevented Hayuk from installing a mural in Lviv over the summer, but the artist remains undeterred. “In mid-July, I met the mayor [of Lviv] Andriy Sadovyi and his wife at a local municipal hospital that assists with the rehabilitation of veterans,” Hayuk said. “She studied art and was familiar with my work, and soon we’d taken them across the street to an opening at the Dzyga Art Center, where she whispered in his ear. Next thing, he said, ‘We want to be the first city in Ukraine to have a Maya Hayuk tryzub.’”

Hayuk had a vision for the mural, taking tryzubs drawn by veterans in art therapy, then painting them on a wall behind the Dzyga Art Center with her Lviv crew, and a timeline that involved completing the project by Ukrainian Independence Day. But the more ministers she met with, the more complicated the position became, with the city and oblast governments in conflict over the blank wall in Lviv’s old city.

“It was close to being realized, but at the end of the day, they couldn’t get it together in time, so I made a plan, and we’ll revisit it in the spring.”