Taras Shevchenko and Printmaking in the Mid-Nineteenth Century | Kultura 2025

Dr Galina Mardilovich

Smart Museum of Art

Curator, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago

Lecture Title:

Taras Shevchenko and Printmaking in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Lecture Synopsis:

This lecture will explore the prints of poet and artist Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), now considered a symbol of Ukrainian independence. Specifically, the lecture will focus on Shevchenko’s ongoing engagement with the printmaking technique of etching and will examine how it afforded him unprecedented opportunities to test a new type of artistic agency. In doing so, this lecture will situate Shevchenko’s pursuit of etching within the broader developments in nineteenth-century printmaking.

Biography:

Dr Galina Mardilovich is Curator at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. She specialises in the history of printmaking, the nineteenth century, and art of the Russian empire. Prior to the Smart, she has held teaching and curatorial positions, including at the University of Cambridge, SUNY Purchase College, and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Her research has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the American Philosophical Society, among others, and has been published in Print Quarterly, Art History, and The Burlington Magazine, as well as in several edited volumes. She is the co-editor of and contributor to New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (with Maria Taroutina; Routledge 2020). Mardilovich received her PhD in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

You can enrol for the full course here.