Stanley Tigerman's Ukrainian Village art museum is getting a new look

Ukrainian Village just isn’t as Ukrainian as it used to be.

That means a lot of things for the West Side neighborhood, but for the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in particular, it means one thing: time for a little rebranding.

“Most people started moving out to the suburbs where the schools are better. [Now], we’ve got a lot of young professionals coming in here. It’s getting harder and harder for us to depend on the Ukrainian community, which is getting quite old,” says museum managing director Orest Hrynewych.

The museum was founded in 1971, after a large wave of post-World War II immigrants from Ukraine landed in Chicago. Ukrainian artists in Chicago had more creative freedom than in Soviet-occupied Ukraine, and a group of artists and collectors wanted a place to display their work.

The group enlisted the help of architect Stanley Tigerman at the request of one of his Ukrainian students at UIC. The celebrated architect imagined a minimalist, 6,700-square-foot museum in an old hobby shop on Chicago Avenue just east of Western, mimicking the size and shape of the storefronts that preceded it. The facility was completed in 1977.

Now, more than 35 years later, Tigerman will chime in on plans for an expansion — including two floors and a sculpture garden — led by architect and museum board member George Sambor.

“[The Ukrainians] have stood up and said: We exist, and this is our cultural heritage, and we are involved in modern art, and here is a museum in your neighborhood. I love it,” Tigerman says.

The extra space would accommodate workshops and classrooms, expand the cramped archives, and enable the museum to exhibit larger works. There are also plans to increase the museum’s hours — now noon to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday — as well as its fleet of volunteers.

The museum will begin construction as soon as it has the funds — beginning with an expansion into a parking lot behind the building. The addition will include a glassed-off outdoor garden in the middle that can be viewed from all sides.

“We purposely wanted to leave the atrium outdoor sculpture garden open to the elements for the excitement that is generated by the four seasons in the Chicago area,” Sambor says. “On a cold night, if you light it correctly, you get the snow falling. You might see the rain falling. You experience the different times of day and the lighting changes. I think we’ve enhanced the quality of the space for the patron to participate in viewing good art.”

That first phase would cost an estimated $250,000, followed by the two-floor addition, which could be an additional $750,000, says museum business manager Andriy Hudzan. To fund it all, the nonprofit museum will turn to past donors and foundations, as well as try to tap new sources of funding.

“This will be a daunting project,” executive director Orysia Cardoso says. “But one that will definitely set up the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art as a major art venue in the city.”

As the Ukrainian population has dropped in the community, the museum has adapted. Though there once was more of an emphasis on Ukrainian artists, the migration of the ethnic group away from the neighborhood has resulted in the inclusion of more local and national artists at the museum.

“We are Ukrainian, but kind of a lowercase Ukrainian,” Hrynewych says. “We’re actually more of a contemporary art museum in the Ukrainian Village. We might have to change our name to that: Institute of Modern Art in the Ukrainian Village.”