Acknowledgments

From the time Jurii Maniichuk first began identifying and buying paintings in Kyiv in the mid-1990s, dozens, if not hundreds, of people have played key roles in the formation of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection. I cannot possibly name everyone but I am grateful to the many museum officials, art specialists, conservators, friends, and others who helped my husband, then both of us, and later me with the collection.

The idea of donating the collection came from my consultant, Edward Kasinec, Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Curator Emeritus of the Slavic and East European Collections of the New York Public Library. He connected me with the curators and directors of the three museums where the collection is now housed: Parker Curator of Russian Art Asen Kirin and Director William U. Eiland of the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia; then-Curator of Russian and European Art Galina Mardilovich and Collection Manager Stephen S. Fisher of the Mead Art Museum of Amherst College; and Chief Curator Maria Zavialova and Director Mark J. Meister of The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA). I am grateful to all of them for accepting my gifts from the collection. Thanks also to TMORA for publishing my memoir, The Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection of Soviet Ukrainian Art: A Journey of Art, Politics, and Life, and to Myroslava M. Mudrak, Professor Emeritus, Art History, of The Ohio State University, for writing a thoughtful introduction to the book.

Art Advisor Betsy Thomas in New York City also provided valuable assistance to me from 2017 through 2019.

I am also grateful to the many people involved in exhibiting the paintings over the years: Art Director Walter Hoydysh of the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City; Richard Aste, then-Curator of European Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; Olga and Leeza Arkhangelskaya, owners of EastWest Fine Art Gallery in Naples, Florida; Associate Director Melissa Minds VandeBurgt and then-Dean Dr. Kathleen Miller of the Florida Gulf Coast University Library in Fort Myers, Florida. It was wonderful to see paintings from the collection exhibited several times in the years following my husband’s death in 2009. Art historian Olena Martynyuk, Ph.D., co-curated the two major exhibitions at the Ukrainian Institute of America and penned an excellent essay for the inaugural exhibition catalogue in 2012.

Thanks also go to conservator Carolyn Tomkiewicz and art handler Travis Molkenbur and their teams, who helped me with the paintings starting in 2011 and continuing through the shipment of the last gift to TMORA in Minneapolis in 2020. Conservator Viviana Dominguez helped with the exhibitions in Florida. Thanks also go to photographers Vladimir Maruzhenko, Andrew Popper, and Scott Campbell, whose images of the collection and of my husband and me are included on this website.

I would like to express special thanks to George and Oksana Nesterczuk. As close friends of my husband before our marriage, they were involved with the collection from the beginning. When the container of paintings arrived in the Washington, D.C. area in 1999, they graciously agreed to store the works in their home, where they remained for many years. I consider the Nesterczuks the “godparents” of the collection. Finally, I am forever grateful to my family and friends for supporting and encouraging me during all the years I sought a permanent home for the paintings.

-Rose Brady, donor of the Jurii Maniichuk and Rose Brady Collection