Lika Spivakovska closed her two art galleries in Kyiv, Ukraine, a week into the war. She converted damaged artworks into digitized NFTs that were exhibited and sold at Lighthouse, an NFT art gallery in Puerto Rico.
Lika Spivakovska closed her two art galleries in Kyiv, Ukraine, a week into the war. She converted damaged artworks into digitized NFTs that were exhibited and sold at Lighthouse, an NFT art gallery in Puerto Rico.Credit...Igor Viery
Lika Spivakovska closed her two art galleries in Kyiv, Ukraine, hours after Russia invaded her country and felt helpless as she traveled across Europe, seeking refuge with her two children. Artists stuck in Ukraine had been messaging her all week, saying that their home workshops and studios had been destroyed by attackers.
Explosions in eastern Ukraine had damaged about 20 dedicated spaces for artists, leaving canvasses charred, paintings tattered and entire livelihoods lost, according to text messages sent to Ms. Spivakovska. “I am without studio, paints, canvasses and none of my own works,” one artist lamented in a message.
“I felt so guilty,” said Ms. Spivakovska, 38, who has been championing emerging Ukrainian artists for nearly a decade, placing their work in one of her galleries, Spivakovska Art:Ego, which opened in 2014.
Now it was her responsibility, she believed, to help them throughout the war.
She posted a call for help on Facebook in February, asking if someone could connect her with a person familiar with NFTs, or nonfungible tokens — a kind of digital collectible item that is stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its authenticity.
Many of the artists’ works had been destroyed; but maybe, she thought, the saved photos of their pieces could be digitized into NFTs. Maybe that would allow poor Ukrainian painters to stay financially afloat through online auctions as the war dragged on.
Eventually, a friend connected Ms. Spivakovska with Crystal Rose Pierce, the founder of Lighthouse, an NFT art gallery in Puerto Rico.
“When I got the phone call from her, it was 4 o’clock in the morning,’’ Ms. Pierce said, “and I knew it was something important.”
She told Ms. Spivakovska that the photos of the Ukrainians’ art, and the images taken of the damaged paintings and drawings after Russian attacks, could be minted into NFTs and be a part of a show at the Lighthouse museum in San Juan.