Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts

Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts (Харківська державна академія дизайну та мистецтв; Kharkivska derzhavna akademiia dyzainu ta mystetstv). Higher educational institution in Kharkiv offering a program primarily in the fields of industrial design, graphic design, interior design, fashion design, decorative fabric, advertisement, and decorative and applied art. Its predecessor was Kharkiv Art Institute. Founded in 1927–28 on the basis of the Kharkiv Art Tekhnikum (est 1921), it was a leading art school in Soviet Ukraine with a status of an institution of higher education. A number of its teachers had studied at Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, including its first rector Oleksii Kokel (a student of Ilia Repin). By the end of the 1920s Kharkiv Art Institute had two faculties: painting and sculpture as well as architecture. It was one of the major centers of modernism and avant-garde in Ukraine. In the early 1930s, however, artistic freedom in the institute was considerably curtailed under the new rector Pavlo Kryven who was a known enemy of avant-garde and particularly of the so-called Boichukism (the school of painter Mykhailo Boichuk). In 1934 it was relegated to the status of an institution of secondary education. During the Second World War it was evacuated to Samarkand (Uzbekistan). In 1945 its name and the status of a higher school were restored. It had three faculties: painting, graphic art, and sculpture.

The current institution was formed in 1963 out of the Kharkiv Art Institute (1921–63) under the name Kharkiv Industrial Design Institute, a five-year art school under the Ministry of Higher and Specialized Secondary Education of the Ukrainian SSR. A graduate program was added in 1989 and trains students in design and fine arts. In 2001 the school was reorganized into an academy and assumed its current name.

The academy has four faculties: fine art (with the departments of painting, graphic art, sculpture, monumental painting, theory and history of art, drawing, and restoration and expertise of works of art), design (with the departments of design, graphic design, and multimedia design), environmental design (with the departments of design of environment, architecture, design of textiles and clothes, and pedagogy, Ukrainian and foreign philology), and audiovisual arts and distant learning (with the departments of audiovisual art, visual practices, methodologies of cross-cultural practices, and a section of engineering and technical disciplines). The academy runs a two-year art lyceum in Kharkiv (opened in 1992). It also has a museum, including an exhibition hall. The enrollment is around 1,350. Its library has more than 125,000 copies of books and periodicals, including rare editions (1,200 copies), including The Costume of the Hereditary States of the House of Austria (London, 1804) and Russkii narodnyi ornament. Shit’e, tkani, kruzheva (vol. 1, Saint Petersburg, 1872). The academic staff of the institute and, later, academy has included Ivan Padalka, Anatol Petrytsky, Mykola Samokysh, Stefan Taranushchenko, Oleksii Beketov, Vasyl Yermilov, Borys Kosarev, Yosyp Daits, Leonid Andriievsky, Mykhailo Derehus, Ivan Boichenko, Leonid I. Chernov, and Serhii Solodovnyk. Its rectors have been Oleksii Kokel (1921–23), Bernard Kratko (1923–25), Mykola Burachek (1925–27), Anton Komashko (1927–32), Pavlo Kryven (1932–34), I. Avgust (1934–41), Serhii Besedin (1943–48), Mykhailo Shaposhnykov (1948–72), Yevhen Yehorov (1972–85), Volodymyr Torkatiuk (1985–98), Viktor Danylenko (1999–2021), and Oleksandr Sobolev (2021–). The academy publishes journal Visnyk Kharkivs'koї derzhavnoї akademiї dyzainu ta mystetstv (1999–). Between 1997 and 2020 it also published journal Tradytsiї ta innovatsiї u vyshchii arkhitekturno-khudozhnii osviti.

The academy’s official website is https://www.ksada.org/.

Serhiy Bilenky

[The entry was updated in 2023.]