Božena Hrycyna is an amateur singer of traditional village songs, embroiderer, pysanka maker, weaver of threads and grasses, and textile craftsperson… actively learning and sharing these artforms from her Ukrainian/Ruthenian heritage. She has taken workshops and travelled extensively in pursuit of deeper understandings of these and other folkways, and apprenticed to the land, spending the last five years on a homestead near Wilno, Ontario

Božena Hrycyna is an amateur singer of traditional village songs, embroiderer, pysanka maker, weaver of threads and grasses, and textile craftsperson… actively learning and sharing these artforms from her Ukrainian/Ruthenian heritage. She has taken workshops and travelled extensively in pursuit of deeper understandings of these and other folkways, and apprenticed to the land, spending the last five years on a homestead near Wilno, Ontario

Myroslava Boikiv is an art restorer, curator, author, researcher and multi-media artist. Since coming to Canada in 2016, she has actively promoted Ukrainian culture in North America. She gives fascinating lectures and master classes on the topics of women's traditional wear, jewelry, embroidery, weaving, straw art and more. Myroslava generously shares her talent, expertise, and love for Ukrainian culture with Canadian and international audiences.

Spring and Easter Items for everyone.

Enjoy refreshments at the SVI Cafe

Pysanka Workshop

Pop-Up Christmas Market

Saturday, December 4 10 am - 4 pm

Our Christmas Boutique has something for everyone …

Decorations, Holiday Greeting Cards, Books of All Kind, Baba’s Treasures, Gifts Galore ….. and much more.

In connection with the exhibit, The Spirit of Beads: Sharing our Stories, the Ukrainian Museum of Canada, Ontario Branch and the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto present the following lecture via Zoom. “Grandmother’s Beads - Heirloom Preservation and the Importance of Stories.”

Can you identify a cultural artifact from an heirloom?
What is valuable enough to keep?
What should be donated?
How can one tell the difference?
Looking through examples of antique Ukrainian beadwork and drawing on Indigenous teachings,
this talk will explain how preserving heritage goes beyond the physical and into the realm of Memory.

Description: Join Riley Kucheran, Assistant Professor of Design Leadership at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion, and Liana Satenstein, senior fashion writer for Vogue, for a lively discussion of contemporary Ukrainian and Indigenous fashion. Topics will include the rise of contemporary Ukrainian and Indigenous fashion designers, resurgence of traditional symbols and motifs, environmentalism and sustainability, and how you can support local designers. 

Liana Bio:

Liana Satenstein is a Senior Fashion Writer at Vogue. For seven years, she has been covering the development of fashion in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Much of her focus has been on Ukraine where she has traveled to numerous times to cover fashion week in Kyiv. Her work in the region has included the rise of national dress within contemporary fashion after the 2014 revolution, the cultural clothing of Crimean Tatars, and she has spotlighted numerous local Ukrainian designers. Her grandmother hails from Kyiv while her great-grandparents were from Lviv. 

Riley Bio: 

Riley Kucheran (Biigtigong Nishnaabeg) is an Assistant Professor of Design Leadership at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion. As an Indigenous fashion researcher he supports the global community of Indigenous makers who are leading design resurgence. His scholarship bridges Indigenous theory and methodologies with retail management and entrepreneurship strategy in order to mobilize fashion as a powerful tool for decolonization. He is also the Associate Director of Saagajiwe, the Faculty of Communication and Design’s Centre for Indigenous Research and Creation, and a PhD Candidate studying community-based stores and co-operatives as sites of cultural and economic resurgence.

Socials

Riley Twitter/Instagram: @rskucheran
School of Fashion Twitter/Instagram: @RyersonFashion
Faculty of Communication and Design: @RyersonFCAD

Description: The stunning pizzazz comes from the continuous zigzag and the contrasting beads. Maria Rypan will show you how easily the zigzag pattern is created by colour placement as you bead along. The motifs are quickly formed as you bead weave vertically up and down. The colour changes keep you on your toes and works up quickly into a bracelet band

3 hours

Time: 1pm - 4pm Saturday, June 12 2021

Maximum participants: 15

Age/experience level: Comfortable with in-hand beadweaving 

Cost per participant: $45

Description: Be dazzled by the splendour of traditional adornments, or “prykrasy”, from different ethnographic regions of Ukraine. See how seed beads create incredible patterns and motifs in loomwoven “gerdany”, and netted “sylianky”. Understand why and how the distinctive adornments styles were worn. This spirit continues to inspire contemporary beaders of today as seen in Maria Rypan’s rich visual presentation.

Bio: Maria Rypan has become a recognized expert in Ukrainian-style beadwork. She is continually experimenting with new ways of beading within her cultural tradition. Her specialties are netting, unique beadweaving and loomweaving techniques. In 1995 she wanted to share this unique tradition with like-minded cultural enthusiasts so she developed a series of beadwork classes with her own instructional material. Her most memorable project was the 1992 multi-media event to launch dissident Iryna Senyk’s White Aster of Love. Maria designed 27 dresses, produced a bilingual 160 page deluxe book and the multi-media Premiere. Since 1995 Rypan Designs has a strong international presence through teaching, producing a kit line, doing shows and visual presentations on beading and global folk arts in Canada, USA and Ukraine. Visit www.rypandesigns.com

Strawberry Pin Cushions with Naomi Smith
Description: Create a functional and decorative 3-D beaded strawberry pin cushion influenced by a century-old Indigenous design. The strawberry is an esteemed symbol of Woodlands Culture. Antique beads will be incorporated into the design as a way of honouring the history of this piece. Traditional teachings will be part of the learning experience.

Full day workshop

Time: 10am - 4pm, Saturday May 15 2021

Maximum participants: 40

Age/experience level: This is an all skills level mature workshop (No children). Comfort with hand sewing is an asset. 

Cost per participant: $60

Description: Malinda Gray, an avid beader for decades, will discuss and highlight the cultural importance of Indigenous beadwork within modern society. Gray will also expand on her Master’s thesis Beads: Symbols of Indigenous Cultural Resilience and Value (University of Toronto). Gray is an Ojibway kwe from the Lac Seul Band, who loves sharing her knowledge.

Bio:  Malinda Gray, M.A., is an Indigenous Studies PhD Candidate at Trent University, where she also facilitates beading workshops for the First Peoples House of Learning. She lives in Peterborough, ON with her husband, three sons, and her cat, Hazel.

Description: Join artist Katie Longboat in making a pair of beautiful beaded fringe earrings. Katie is a Toronto based Indigenous (Mohawk and Cree) bead artist, originally from
Six Nations of the Grand River. She has over 15 years of experience with both creating beadwork and facilitating beading workshops.

3 hours

Time 1pm - 4pm, Saturday April 24 2021

Maximum Participants: 25

Age/experience level: Open to all experience levels

Cost per participant: $40

Description: Ukrainian immigrants have made Canada their home since 1891 and many relied on the kindness of the Indigenous peoples they encountered to make it through their first winter and beyond. But somehow, in making Canada our home, we erased the Indigenous peoples whose knowledge and lands were integral to our ancestors’ survival and success from our stories. This presentation will share some of the stories of Ukrainians and Indigenous peoples that have been recovered and seeks to answer the question, can we do better when we tell our stories of these lands?

Bio: Leah Hrycun is a PhD Student who has spent most of her life in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (amisk-wa-chi-was-ga-hi-gan), also known as Edmonton. She is a third generation Ukrainian Canadian who also shares German and Jewish ancestry. Her research interests include Métis histories, material culture, repatriation, land settlement and dispossession, settler-colonialism, and white settler supremacy on the prairies. Her current research seeks to recover narratives of Indigenous- Ukrainian relations in east central Alberta in the hope that it will open dialogues surrounding the shared histories of these lands and address why so few historians consider the presence of Indigenous peoples and land in Ukrainian Canadian histories. By recovering these histories and deconstructing how and why Ukrainian settlers came to support Canadian settler-colonialism, she hopes to redresses Indigenous erasure in Ukrainian settler histories and ultimately provide space for Ukrainian Canadians to move toward being in good relation with the Cree, Nakota, and Métis people who also call these lands home.

Speaker Series

Description: In this two-part family workshop presented in partnership with UNF Toronto Branch, participants will learn basic Indigenous and Ukrainian beadwork techniques with artists Katie Longboat and Anastasia Baczynskyj. Participants will be encouraged to reflect on cultural practices, traditions, and belief systems through their shared appreciation of the beauty of beadwork. By the end of this two-part workshop, participants will have completed two projects. 
This is a two-part workshop. Ticket includes both workshops and participants should be available for both dates.

Ages 8 - 18

Maximum participants: 25

Cost per participant: FREE
This workshop is generously funded by Olzhych Foundation.

Day One:  Introduction to Bead Embroidery with Katie Longboat

Please note that bead colours may vary from the colours in the photograph.

Saturday, March 27 2021, 3pm - 4:30pm

Day Two: Coral Bead Necklaces with Anastasia Baczynskyj

Saturday, April 10 2021, 3pm - 4:30pm

Ancestors & Elders and Dancing on Eggshells

In connection with their recent exhibition The Spirit of Beads: Sharing our Stories, Ukrainian Museum of Canada: Ontario Branch and Native Canadian Centre of Toronto present the exclusive Toronto premiere screening of Ukrainian Shumka Dancers’ Ancestors & Elders and accompanying documentary Dancing on Eggshells. The film screenings will be followed by a panel discussion with co-directors Barry Bilinsky and Joseph Hoffman and moderated by documentary co-director Leslie Sereda.

Shumka Screening Information

The Spirit of Beads: Sharing Our Stories is our first collaboration with our neighbours at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto and includes an incredible array of beaded jewellery, clothing, bags, and many more beautiful items. We are very proud to feature the work of contemporary Indigenous and Ukrainian beadwork artists, alongside dazzling historic gems. 

Our opening event will feature a blessing from Indigenous Elder Jimmy Dick, who will welcome virtual guests with an entrance song and a prayer of thanks. This ceremony also welcomes and honours all the artifacts coming from their various homes, as they begin their time with us at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada, Ontario Branch.

Virtual opening guests will also experience a virtual guided tour of the museum with UMC OB President, Daria Diakowsky, and exhibition Curator, Lily Stafford. This tour will highlight some personal favourites, and give the participants an opportunity to view items in more detail.

(1975 film) A man becomes jealous when his fiancée, Marichka, allows an army officer to stay in her family home.

Join us for our nostalgic Vintage Movie Nights as part of our Everything Old is Cool Again programming!

Admission: $10, cash bar

Dr. Brian A. Butcher (PhD, Saint Paul University/University of Ottawa) is Lecturer and Research Fellow at the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies in the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, Ontario. His research focuses on Eastern Catholicism, liturgy, the relationship between Orthodox theology and contemporary philosophy, and interreligious dialogue. Recently published is his Liturgical Theology After Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur (Fordham University Press, 2018). He is a subdeacon in the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church.

Rev. Bohdan Hladio was born in Sewickley, Pennsylvania and received his theology degree from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He moved to Toronto in 1983 and married his wife, Tania, in 1984. Together they have raised three married children, and have served parishes in Toronto, Hamilton, and currently Oshawa, Ontario. In addition, Fr. Bohdan served as the chancellor of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada from 2005 through 2008. He has written hundreds of articles for church and secular newspapers and has led spiritual retreats throughout Canada for various Orthodox Christian churches and parishes.

As an Orthodox theologian and ecumenist, the Very Rev. Archpriest Dr. Jaroslaw Buciora concentrates his research on systematic Orthodox theology, particularly Orthodox ecclesiology, with a specific emphasis on the situation of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Fr. Jaroslaw is a parish priest of the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Toronto, Ontario. Previously, he was a lecturer of Systematic Theology, Ethics, and Patristics at St. Andrew’s College and the University of Winnipeg. Fr. Jaroslaw gained his Master’s degree in Theological Studies from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology (Brookline, US) and a Doctorate in Theology from Christian Theological Academy (Warsaw, Poland). He is the author of four books and over fifty theological articles and analyses in journals and presentations made in Canada, the US, England, Germany, Holland and Ukraine. He represents the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada on the Canadian Council of Churches Faith and Order Commission, Christian Interfaith Reference Group, and Governing Board. In 2011, Fr. Jaroslaw became an official representative of the UOCC and the US in the ongoing bilateral dialogue with the Ukrainian Catholic Church of North America.

Rev. Dr. Peter Galadza is Director of the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies and Professor of Liturgy at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. From 2003 to 2004 he was a research fellow at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Research Center in Georgetown, Washington, DC. During the 1999-2000 academic year, he served as dean of the L’viv Theological Academy in Ukraine (presently the Ukrainian Catholic University), for which he was awarded the jeweled pectoral cross by then Bishop Lubomyr Husar.

The St. Demetrius Orthodox Church Quartet, from Toronto, Ontario, was started approximately 10 years ago at St. Demetrius Ukrainian Orthodox Church to introduce and expose people to the beautiful and rich liturgical a cappella choral tradition of our Ukrainian churches. The quartet focuses mainly on Baroque music written by Artem Vedel, Dmytro Bortniansky, Maksym Berezovsky, more modern composers such as Kyrylo Stetsenko and Oleksander Koshetz, as well as current composers like Roman Hurko. It has performed at St. Demetrius Parish Khram celebrations, Taras Shevchenko concerts, Lesia Ukrainka Moleben in Toronto, Khram celebrations in Montreal and Ottawa, and recently at the Eastern Eparchy Centennial Celebration in Oakville, Ontario and the National Jubilee Celebration of the UOCC in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The St. Demetrius Quartet members are Zhanna Zinchenko, Victor Kowalenko, Oksana Klinovska and Ron Demeda. Their dream is to inspire others to sing our beautiful music of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church throughout the world.

Franko Diakowsky has served as a subdeacon at St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral in Toronto, Ontario since 2015 and has prepared liturgical texts in Ukrainian and English for publication since 2013.

Slums, Street Preachers and the Spirit of God: The Emergence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Eastern Canada in the Context of the Early 20th Century Immigrant Experience
The cities of Eastern Canada in which the Ukrainian Orthodox Church took root in the early 1920s were vastly different places from those which welcomed waves of Ukrainian immigrants following the Second World War; in which Ukrainian communities flourished throughout the 1960s and 70s; and which continue to see new generations of Ukrainian immigrants arriving today. An unquenchable New World appetite for development has seen the abandonment of industries where the first Ukrainians worked; subsumed whole neighbourhoods where they lived; toppled once-indispensable community landmarks where they met; and left echoing shadows of the people and the ideas that sustained them. This presentation seeks to recover the context of a vanished time and place in order to rediscover the animating idea that allowed the Church to set down roots in Ontario and Quebec.

Born in Toronto of Ukrainian heritage, Marianna Savaryn received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto and a Bachelor of Education degree from Queen's University. Marianna has always painted and in her late twenties she decided to study Byzantine iconography. Her ten-year apprenticeship with Studite monk Fr. Juvenile Mokritsky was probably her most influential training, allowing her to experience the tradition passed down from one hand to another. During those years she completed the iconostasis at St. Vladimir Ukrainian Catholic Church in Red Deer, Alberta, under his guidance. Her public projects include the Blessed Martyr Vasyl Velychkovsky at the Shrine at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Saint André Bessette in J. H. Picard Catholic School in Edmonton, Alberta. Marianna has also written icons for private devotion. Her icon of the Angel with Golden Hair is in the permanent collection of the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec.

From 2007 to 2010, Marianna collaborated and worked with a group of iconographers on commissions for churches in Bologna, Italy, leading to her inclusion in the book Visible Invisible - Contemporary icons written in Italy (2012). In 2012, she completed seven icons for Ss. Peter & Paul Ukrainian Catholic Church in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which were blessed by His Beatitude Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk during his visit.