On January 10 and 12, 2023, the art event "Art Studios" was held in the Art Memorial Museum of O.O.Osmerkin with the participation of students and teachers of the children's art school of the city of Kropyvnytskyi.
    The head of the fine art department of the children's art school, Olha Krasnopolska, together with the teachers - the famous painter, member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine Yuriy Vintenko, and the young artist Anna Tatarova held an open lesson for students in a museum environment.
    First, the young artists familiarized themselves with the exposition of the thematic art exhibitions "Invincible" and "ART Shelter for Artists", presented as part of the "Art Studios-2022" art project on the theme: "Portraits of contemporaries on the background of war", and then worked creatively for several hours. Students of junior and senior classes reflected the interiors of museum halls and green oases of flowers, which not only decorate them, but also create a special atmosphere filled with sunlight, warmth and coziness, which we all lack in the information space of disturbing news from the front to the sounds of sirens.
    And the teachers of the art school, joined by the artist Nataliya Kornilova, organized a real art workshop in one of the halls of the museum, where memorial items from the Pauchenko-Osmerkin house are now stored, which in peacetime admired the gaze of visitors in the memorial exposition.
    The artist Yuriy Vintenko recreated on canvas with oil paints a decorative forged lantern with multi-colored glasses, which at one time was the decoration of the office of Yelisavethrad architect Yakov Pauchenko and which can be seen in an old photo from the family album, where his nephew young Oleksandr Osmerkin is sitting at the original table with a book in Moorish style. It was on this tile-encrusted wooden table, against the background of the carved and painted door, that his fellow artists created a still life from ceramic jugs, the main one of which was the "Borodyansky Cockerel", which is now an exhibit of one of the museum exhibitions.
    This decorative cock-shaped headstock entered the museum collection on the International Day of Museums on May 18, 2022 - it was donated by Yuriy Vintenko and presented by Olha Krasnopolska. And this is extremely significant, because in that tragic spring the "Borodyansky Cockerel" became a symbol of the indomitability of the Ukrainian spirit. It was not for nothing that the National Museum of the Revolution of Dignity took into the exposition as valuable artifacts a kitchen cabinet with a rooster that miraculously survived on the wall of one of the houses destroyed by the Russian bombing in the city of Borodyanka, Kyiv region. And Kharkiv artist Valeriya Polyanskova presented similar ceramic roosters to the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi and the Prime Minister of Great Britain Boris Johnson during his visit to Kyiv on April 9, 2022, when they were on the Alley of Heroes of the Celectial Hundred.
    Such rooster jugs in soft golden-brown-green colors were produced at the Vasylkiv majolica plant from the beginning of the 1960s until the 1980s. According to Iryna Beketova, the head of the department of research and foundation work of the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art, its authors are the Ukrainian masters of art ceramics Valery and Nadiya Protoryev, who in their time created a whole series of works "Good Animals". During the presentation last summer in Kyiv of the exhibition "Ukrainian Phoenix. Vasylkivska Majolica" General Director of the National Memorial Complex of the Heroes of the Celectial Hundred - Museum of the Revolution of Dignity, Honored Art Worker of Ukraine Ihor Poshivaylo noted: "The title and idea of the exhibition have several meanings: it is not only about the rooster and its revival from the ashes, but also about the revival of cultural identity and historical memory of Ukraine. Cockerel was a part of the peaceful life of a Ukrainian family,it had to see the cruelty and destruction brought by the "Russian peace", but at the same time it witnessed the heroic efforts of Ukrainians to clear rubble and search for the wounded, our mutual aid and solidarity, the ability to hold on despite everything and win ".
    And so the artists from Kropivnytskyi, plunged into a whirlwind of thoughts and hopes, recreated in their drawings a still life with a talisman of the Ukrainian people, a symbol of its stability in the bloody war for the territorial integrity of the country and its independence.
    Teachers together with students created art in the Oleksandr Osmerkin museum - this is the succession of generations, preservation of traditions, interest in studying the history and culture of their people, awareness of themselves as citizens of a free European country.