On December 6, 2024, at the O.O. Osmerkin Art Memorial Museum, on the occasion of the 132nd anniversary of the birth of Oleksandr Osmerkin (December 8), the Kropyvnytskyi Art School, which bears the name of the painter and teacher, traditionally held an opening as part of the art project "Children's Art Gallery".
    This year's exhibition with the symbolic title "Appreciating the Past - Building the Future" is special, as it is dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the school, which began its activities in the fall of 1959. During this time, many of its graduates have become famous artists, but even those who did not become artists, but chose another profession, forever retained their love for creativity and passion for art.
    The exhibition, which is retrospective, features almost thirty creative works by students of different age groups, created in the 1970s–2010s under the guidance of teachers in artistic techniques – pencil, watercolor, gouache, ballpoint pen, linocut. The basis of the exhibition’s exposition is the landscapes of our city, which at that time was called Kirovograd, and now Kropyvnytskyi. Many of the presented drawings reproduce buildings that adorn the architectural ensemble of the historical center of the city, built according to the designs of the talented architect Yakiv Pauchenko (1866–1914), in whose house the museum of his nephew, artist Oleksandr Osmerkin (1892–1953), is located and where students of the art school now study. After all, the museum under martial law has become a real art shelter for students and teachers of the school - for the second year in a row, classes of school classes have been held in the exhibition halls, young artists and their mentors, even during the air raid, have the opportunity to continue to master their knowledge of fine arts in the basement, designated as a shelter.
    The initiator of the presentation of the exhibition of student works from the archive of the art school is its director Hanna Timofiienko, who, by the way, is a graduate of this educational institution. During the opening of the exhibition, she noted: “Together with the Oleksandr Osmerkin Art Memorial Museum, the art school, which bears the name of the artist, implements important tasks to popularize fine arts and children's creativity in our city. The presented works of students- graduates of the school of past years will not leave anyone indifferent. The students' works recreate the historical environment of their hometown during the times when they studied at the art school. The drawings reflect how our children saw the city over the decades, how its face changed. Visitors to the exhibition will have a unique opportunity to take a kind of journey through time – figuratively to travel back to the late 20th – early 21st centuries and understand that only by honoring our past, protecting it from destruction, can we build the future, decorating our hometown with new architectural structures.”
    The opening was welcomed by the school’s teachers – professional artists, laureates of the Yakiv Pauchenko regional award in the field of architecture, heraldry and vexillology and decorative and applied arts in the “decorative and applied arts” nomination, Larysa Kulinich, who is also a graduate of the school, and Oleksandr Kryvko, who created the design of the exhibition poster, as well as the representative of young teachers Polina Odud. But the museum's leading researcher Olha Krasnopolska told an interesting story about how she came to study at the art school and what an important role it played in her choice of the profession of an artist.
    On this day, students and teachers of the school also received gifts - flowers and a congratulatory letter from the museum staff, and from Liudmyla Frenchko, who is the laureate of the regional prize in the field of fine arts and art history named after Oleksandr Osmerkin in the nomination "art criticism and history of art", the book "Victor Frenchko. Portrait of a Sculptor”, which she wrote together with her daughter Yuliia Ponomarenko, and which was presented at the Art Museum on August 6 of this year on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the birth of the famous Kropyvnytskyi artist of monumental art, member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine Viktor Frenchko (1949-2019) – the author of many sculptural compositions, busts, monuments, memorial signs, memorial plaques to historical figures, figures of art and science in Kropyvnytskyi and other cities of the region.
    Current students of the art school looked at the drawings exhibited at the exhibition with interest and dispersed through the museum halls, where they continued to study fine arts at easels, hoping that their best works will be stored in the school archive and presented in the future at exhibitions of children's art.