Photo by Mark DiOrio
Colgate University has announced the exhibition “Ukraine Wartime Posters, 2022–25: The Way of Resistance” and a related lecture-discussion with guest curator Olena Speranska, vice president of the Contemporary Art Researches Union, founder and CEO of BIRUCHIY International Art Residency, and founder of the U.S.-based Ukrainian Contemporary Art Platform. The exhibition will be on view for two months in the Clifford Art Gallery, opening on Wednesday, February 25, 2026. Speranska will present a public lecture on that date as part of the Department of Art Lecture Series. The timing of the exhibition and lecture marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
“Ukrainian Wartime Posters” is a long-term open-air art initiative founded in 2022 by curators Olena Speranska and Gennadiy Kozub in cooperation with the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Zaporizhzhia City Council. The exhibition features 309 graphic works by 42 contemporary artists from Ukraine, Poland, and France at the initiative of the Department of Culture and Tourism of the Zaporizhzhia City Council and the BIRUCHIY Contemporary Art Project. Originally presented in nineteen venues across Ukraine while hostilities continued, the posters emerged from regions facing active bombardment and instability. The works stand as acts of cultural resistance produced under extraordinary conditions.
Created to counter propaganda, sustain public morale, and document military events and war crimes, the posters demonstrate how graphic design operates as a medium of civic engagement during wartime. Speranska has published a companion volume, Wartime Posters, and has organized presentations of the project across Ukraine and internationally, including in Paris, Germany, and Poland. To date, BIRUCHIY has staged more than 50 multimedia exhibitions of contemporary art in Ukraine and abroad, including in Italy, Canada, the United States, Poland, Montenegro, Great Britain, and Germany.
Exhibition coordinator Carolyn Guile, PhD, associate professor of art history, co-director of the Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions, emphasized the broader significance of bringing the project to campus.
“This exhibition invites our academic and regional communities to encounter the artistic response to war through the direct and accessible language of graphic art,” Guile said. “Through Olena Speranska’s firsthand experience working with artists in a war-torn country, audiences will gain insight into how visual culture becomes a vehicle for resilience, documentation, and public voice.”
Guile underscored the exhibition’s relevance to contemporary debates about democracy and sovereignty.
“Art-making answers an imperative to articulate and shape personal and civic autonomy,” she noted. “These posters are striking artistic testimony about the impact of war on personal and civic autonomy. They harness free artistic expression in confronting and responding to matters of life and death that resonate well beyond Ukraine. At a moment when transatlantic relationships are being actively reconsidered, the exhibition creates space to reflect on the shared ideals that undergird cultural self-determination and national sovereignty.”
The exhibition builds on Colgate’s ongoing engagement with contemporary Ukrainian cultural figures and continues a series of public programs exploring artistic and literary responses to war. By foregrounding the visual arts as instruments of witness and resistance, the program invites audiences to consider how creative expression sustains civic life, preserves cultural heritage under threat, and gives visual form to democratic values.
Founded in 1819, Colgate University is a highly selective liberal arts institution in Hamilton, New York, committed to academic excellence and the education of informed citizens and leaders. The Clifford Art Gallery serves as a space to present rotating exhibitions that advance teaching, scholarship, and public dialogue in the visual arts. The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Kraynak Institute for the Study of Freedom and Western Traditions, a forum for civic debate and scholarly research that enlivens intellectual discourse by promoting ideals rooted in Western civilization and traditions yet universal in scope, including free speech, intellectual freedom, and constitutional democracy as understood and established by America’s founders. The institute advances the serious study of Western traditions and cultural heritage — from the early American Republic to the contemporary world — as critical to educating citizens and leaders. Additional co-sponsors include the Colgate University Arts Council, Core Conversations, and the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program.