Kherson Art Museum is included in the list of the most influential in the international ranking

The Kherson Regional Art Museum named after Oleksii Shovkunenko was included in the list of the most influential museums according to the results of the international MuseumWeek 2025.

This was reported on the museum's website.

Among more than 17.5 thousand participants from 80 countries, the Kherson Museum is one of 152 museums included in the ranking. In general, Ukraine was ranked 17th among the participating countries in terms of the number of unique authors who joined MuseumWeek. However, the museum emphasized that Russian museums continued to participate in the event and were not excluded from the list. In 2022, MuseumWeek organizers expressed support for Ukraine and dedicated the hashtag #freedomMW. Despite this, information in Russian, which had disappeared after Russia's full-scale invasion, returned to the official website.

Also, on August 1, the Shovkunenko Museum received back a painting that had previously been attempted to be taken abroad by mail. The new exhibit is a still life by Mykola Tsykovsky "Still Life with a Violin". This work was seized by customs officers in the fall of 2023, when they noticed a "painting with signs of antiquity" among the mail that was attempted to be illegally exported abroad. After examination, it became known that this was a work of the early twentieth century, painted by Tsykovsky, a close friend of the eccentric artist of Ukrainian origin, David Burliuk.

In Kherson, a member of the district council was notified of suspicion of collaboration and organizing the export of cultural property from the museum to Crimea. The former school principal sided with the enemy and contributed to the looting of 10,000 exhibits. Between October 31 and November 4, 2022, on the instructions of the Russian occupation administration and with Kuzmenko's direct participation, 10,223 museum objects were taken from the funds of the Kherson Regional Art Museum named after O.O. Shovkunenko.

Representatives of the occupation administration of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, as well as experts in the field of culture and art, were involved in this. They were responsible for the packaging, transfer and transportation of cultural property to Crimea, where the exhibits were transferred to the Central Museum of Tavrida in Simferopol.

Катерина Глушко