A new Clifford Art Gallery exhibition features more than 300 graphic works of Ukrainian wartime posters created to counter propaganda, sustain public morale, and document military events and war crimes. The posters featured in demonstrate how graphic design operates as a medium of civic engagement during wartime, and how the works stand as acts of cultural resistance produced under extraordinary conditions.
The exhibition opening Feb. 25 featured a lecture and reception with guest curator Olena Speranska, marking the fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Speranska is vice president of the Contemporary Art Researches Union, director of the Art Residencies program with BIRUCHIY Contemporary Art Project, and founder of the U.S.-based Ukrainian Contemporary Art Platform. The exhibition will be open through May 1 and additional information is available through the .
Speranska shared powerful images and videos during her presentation showing the war’s devastation of Ukraine, and spoke about the importance of art’s connection to history and remembrance.
“With a single piece of art we can research our past, we can understand our present, and we can relate to the evolution of human society in the future,” Speranska said.
Speranska said in early March 2022 she received a request to create an art project to show support for Ukrainians, which resulted in the first exhibition of Ukrainian anti-war posters at the Ogaki poster museum in Japan. When she began searching online she found many war-related images posted by Ukrainian artists, using the only tools they had available to them — mobile phones, tablets, and personal laptops. Speranska began to collect the images and knew she had to use this art to share information with the world about the war’s impact on Ukraine.
“We can clearly declare that Russia is a terrorist state, and that’s why we must work with counterpropaganda to spread the truth about what is really going on,” Speranska said.
“Ukrainian Wartime Posters” is a long-term open-air art initiative founded in 2022 by curators 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. The posters were originally presented in 19 exhibitions across Zaporizhzhia in 2022–2023, emerging from regions facing active bombardment and instability.
Speranska has published a companion volume, Wartime Posters, and has organized presentations of the project across Ukraine and internationally. The exhibitions have been staged in Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. 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, and 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.
“These posters are striking artistic testimony about the impact of war on personal and civic autonomy," Guile noted. "They harness free artistic expression to confront and respond 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 ԱƵ’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, ԱƵ 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 ԱƵ Arts Council, Core Conversations, and the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program.
