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The Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada (NTSh) announced two important awards in 2024. The first is an annual scholarship of up to $5,000 for researching and writing a scholarly article (in Ukrainian, English or French) on a Ukrainian-Canadian topic. This year, priority was given to research on cultural issues, especially in the visual arts and music. Preference was given to research on the contribution of Ukrainian artists to world cultural heritage and the contribution of Ukrainians to the formation and development of Canadian culture.
The laureate of this year’s scholarship is Dr. Lada Tsymbala, a member of NTSh in Ukraine. During her temporary stay in Edmonton from September 2022 to July 2023, she was actively involved in the work of NTSh in Edmonton. From 1999 to the present, Dr. Tsymbala is an associate professor of the Department of History and Theory of Arts of the Lviv National Academy of Arts.
In 2003, Dr. Tsymbala earned a doctoral degree in art studies at the Lviv National Academy of Arts, specializing in decorative and applied arts. The title of her dissertation was “Gold-weaving in Galicia from the 18th to the first third of the 20th centuries: History, typology, and characteristics of art and style.” Dr. Tsymbala is the author of numerous scholarly monographs and journal articles, and has been invited to give lectures, conference and other presentations.
Dr. Tsymbala was awarded the scholarship for researching and writing an academic article on the topic “Wadym Dobrolige: The artist’s work in Canadian socio-cultural discourse.” As she describes, Wadym Dobrolige was a unique multifaceted Ukrainian artist who received his professional art education at the famous Kyiv Art Institute in the 1930s, and after coming to Canada in the 1950s and 1960s contributed to the formation of a holistic model of Ukrainian sacred art in Alberta (he designed the interiors of more than 50 churches) who proved himself a successful set designer, a decorator for many Edmonton theatre performances, and who designed a number of hotels, restaurant complexes and public space interiors. He also organized a number of artistic events in the Ukrainian community of the city, creating a unique artistic image of the city of Edmonton.
As Dr. Tsymbala explains, the work of the academically trained painter (who became known during World War II for the painted portraits he created in his studio in the Heidenau displaced persons camp, near Hamburg, Germany) changed significantly after moving to Canada. In a society of great creature comforts, whose post-war period was characterized by grandiose urban development, the growth of an urban entertainment infrastructure and consumer culture, the need for an artist with an academic worldview was obliged to metamorphose into a need for an artist-decorator, a designer of city holiday scenes, shop windows and department store displays and fashion shows. Despite the artist’s numerous initiated and implemented projects and the creation of the posthumous (1973) Wadym Dobrolige Foundation, his artistic legacy remains minimally researched to this day. Dr. Tsymbala’s research addresses the problem of correlation between fine (sacred) art in Dobrolige’s body of work and his design projects, the conditioning of the artistic features of the artist’s works by fashion trends and consumer tastes in the diaspora, as well as the artist’s contribution to the historical and cultural heritage of Canada.
The second NTSh Canada award, a publication grant in the sum of $5,000, was given to the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) for the publication of an English-language translation of Pavlo Khrystiuk’s documentary history, The Ukrainian Revolution, 1917–1919: A Documentary Analysis.
As CIUS describes, the English translation of this extremely important scholarly and documentary study of the early stages of the Ukrainian revolution of 1917-1921, originally published in Vienna in 1921-1922, is a unique first-person account of the events of the Ukrainian revolution that began in 1917 and of the Ukrainian state that was created as a result and which received international recognition by the Central Powers in February 1918 through the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. These two stories were almost unknown to historians of the October Revolution of 1917, which is conventionally regarded as the “Russian” revolution. This voluminous, more than 1,000-page book (most likely to be printed in two volumes) will be published in the English translation by Alan Rutkowski and will include an introduction by the late Prof. Mark von Hagen, as well as numerous scholarly footnotes and annotations. More about Pavlo Khrystiuk can be found online at https://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CK%5CH%5CKhrystiukPavlo.htm; and https://chtyvo.org.ua/authors/Mark_von_Hagen/Pavlo_Khrystiuks_History_and_the_Politics_of_Ukrainian_Anti-Colonialism_anhl.pdf.
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The Ukrainian Weekly was founded in 1933 to serve the Ukrainian American community and to function as a vehicle for communication of that community’s concerns to the general public in the United States. It is the official English-language publication of the Ukrainian National Association.
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