Christina Pelenski

Mazepa was not only an outstanding statesman, politician, diplomat, and military leader, but also a devoted patron of the arts. During his hetmancy, Ukrainian Baroque culture reached an unprecedented flourishing in literature, painting, and architecture.

Christina Pelenski

Christina Pelenski was a Ukrainian and American art historian, artist, and the author of the book “Mazepa’s Image in French Romantic Art”.
Christina Pelenski (née Buk) was born on April 7, 1935. She was the eldest of three children in her family. Her father, Andriy Buk, and her mother, Kateryna (née Smotrych), who came from a noble lineage, raised her in an intellectually engaged environment.
In 1944, Christina left for Europe with her family and, following the end of the Second World War, emigrated to the United States. From the age of seventeen, she worked at the editorial office of the newspaper “Svoboda” (New Jersey, USA). Her first academic training was in biochemistry; she graduated from Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA) in 1963. In the same year, she married the historian Yaroslav Pelenski. Between 1964 and 1967, she worked as a research associate at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. She also assisted her husband in his scholarly and editorial work, contributing in particular to the journal-almanac “Vidnova” and to the publication of the complete works of Viacheslav Lypynsky.
Pelenski later pursued a second higher education in art history at the University of Iowa (Iowa, USA), where she studied intermittently between 1969 and 1977. She earned a Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Arts, and a Master of Fine Arts, and worked there for many years as a teaching assistant. Her thesis, “Mazepa’s Image in French Romantic Art, was published in 2018 by the Ukrainian publishing house Apriori as a bilingual Ukrainian-English monograph.
Christina Pelenski passed away in 2005 in New York. She was laid to rest at the South Bound Brook Cemetery (New Jersey, USA).
Pelenski’s artistic legacy comprises approximately fifty graphic and painterly works, as well as numerous sketches. Fifteen of her woodcuts, donated by her husband, Yaroslav Pelenski, have been preserved since 2018 in the Ukrainian Diaspora Museum collection.