A child rarely holds onto their homeland as something vast and abstract. More often, it lives on in a familiar landscape, an object, a face, a color, or a scene whose meaning is clear above all to the young artist themselves. It was from these personal images that Memories, an exhibition of artwork opened by Ukrainian Studies in Calgary on October 3, took shape. The exhibition is on display at the hall of the Colonel Yevhen Konovalets Branch of the Ukrainian Youth Association of Canada (CYM).
The exhibition features works by children ages 7 to 12 who take part in the art education program of the Ukrainian Studies community initiative. Led by Andriy Sendetskyy, the program has been running in Calgary since 2024, and the CYM hall is one of its regular locations.
For the young artists, the theme of Memories was a challenging creative task. They were asked to draw on their own experience: to recall the places, events, people, objects, and feelings that connect them to Ukraine, and to translate those images into art. The result is a dialogue between two parts of their still very short lives: their experience in Ukraine and their new reality in Canada. It is this boundary that gives the works their particular expressive power. The artists are too young to speak about emigration in the language of historical generalizations. Instead, they speak through detail, form, color, and personal imagery. In these works, memory appears not as something frozen in time, but as a living inner landscape. It preserves a connection to home, helps make sense of change, and gradually brings together a Ukrainian past and a Canadian present.
In a broader context, Memories can be seen as a visual marker of the culture of memory among a new generation of Ukrainians in Canada. At the same time, the exhibition opens a space for dialogue between different generations and waves of Ukrainian immigration. For some, Ukraine is a childhood they lived through firsthand; for others, it is the country of their parents or grandparents. For those born in Canada, it is a cultural heritage they discover through language, family history, tradition, and art. That is why this exhibition goes beyond a simple showcase of children’s art. In Calgary’s multicultural environment, it becomes a way to talk about the Ukrainian experience in a language that needs no complicated explanation. Here, art works as a form of cultural communication through the universal ideas of home, memory, belonging, and personal history.
The Memories project is part of Ukrainian Studies’ comprehensive educational program, whose visual arts track is taught by instructor Oleh Bolyuk. The program combines artistic practice with reflection on Ukrainian cultural heritage and on the identity of children who are growing up in several cultural environments at once.
This exhibition is already the third showcase in 2026 of creative work by young Calgarians taking part in Ukrainian Studies’ educational programs.
That number represents more than a series of exhibitions. It reflects a sustained effort to create an environment in which Ukrainian culture is, for a child, more than a heritage to be preserved. It becomes a space for personal expression, for making sense of one’s own experience, and for building cultural continuity.
In this sense, the title Memories feels especially fitting.
