In 2013 the Ukrainian American Archives & Museum of Detroit was asked by the Detroit Historical Museum to organize an exhibit about the Ukrainian diaspora in Detroit. They were allocated an exhibition hall, and given free reign as to themes and subject matter.  Chrystyna Nykorak, the museum director, decided to make pysanky the focal point of the exhibit, which also included a general introduction to Ukraine, the history of Ukrainians in Detroit, and a gallery of traditional Ukrainian costumes. She invited me and two other Detroit-area pysankary, Arnie Klein and Roman Seniuk, to participate.

The photos on the following pages are from that exhibit.  We had approximately 1300 pysanky arranged in 11 display cases.  More than half were mine.  The pysanky were both traditional and diaspora, and encompassed the pysanka traditions of all the regions of Ukraine as well as the diaspora in Detroit.  I have divided the photos up by display cases, and have included the text from my exhibit guide.

If you wish, you can download the materials I wrote about pysanka symbolism and motifs.  That material was included in exhibit posters, and incorporated into the museum’s Spring 2013 and 2016 Newsletter (available for purchase here).

Symbolism and Motifs

From the museum guide:  This is the first of the free-standing box cases, and it contains a very different type of pysanka.  The pysanky in this case come from the Lemko regions, in the foothills of the Carpathians. While Lemky are ethnographic Ukrainians, and many live in the Zakarpattya oblast (state) of Ukraine, many more reside in areas which are now a part of Eastern Slovakia and Poland.

While Lemky do write pysanky in the traditional manner, they also write them in the drop-pull style, using a pin or nail to apply the hot, molten wax to the egg.  They create designs with the dots and commas they created by touching the pinhead to the egg and pulling. Lemky favor bright colors, and the eggs are rarely multicolored.  They create not only stars, suns and flowers, but human figures, waves, intricate borders and birds. 

Can you find the pysanky with women on them?  Dancers?  Flying birds (swallows)?

The pysanky in this case were written by Arnie Klein and me, Luba Petrusha.