Today, Julia and Max Voloshyn run one of the city’s hottest new galleries—and they are fighting for their home country from Florida.
If not for Miami Art Week, Julia and Max Voloshyn, the founders of the city’s buzziest new art gallery, would be in a war zone a world away.
The couple—who founded Kyiv’s Voloshyn Gallery in 2016—came to Miami three years ago with their now-4-year-old daughter to exhibit at NADA and Untitled Art. The family ended up catching Covid and postponing their return home, which led to their opening a prescient pop-up exhibition, “The Memory on Her Face,” featuring Ukrainian artists responding to the 2014 Russian invasion of Donbas. They never went home.
By February 2022, Russia had launched yet another brutal invasion of their homeland, and the Voloshyns became full-time Miami residents. “We still maintain our programming in Kyiv,” says Max. Doing so is a Herculean feat that involves balancing safety precautions and limited resources to manage exhibitions remotely with their team back home. When Russia first attacked Ukraine, the couple closed their space for over a year—converting it into a bomb shelter that housed artists and gallery employees during the harsh winter months.
