On February 27, 2026, “Icons: The Old Believers and Their World” opens at the Icon Museum and Study Center in Clinton, Massachusetts.

The Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection began to take shape in the United States in the 1990s and today comprises sixty outstanding examples of religious art dating from the mid-17th to the early 20th century. It includes works from the major icon-painting centers of the Vladimir region—Palekh, Mstera, and Kholuy, as well as icons originating from Old Believer communities in Guslitsy and Vetka. Since 2015, the collection has been managed by Oleg’s son and Fine Art Shippers’ co-owner Ilya Kushnirskiy.

More than thirty works from it will be presented alongside rarely exhibited icons from the museum’s own holdings, offering a curatorial perspective on the artistic and spiritual legacy of the Old Believers, one of the most distinctive currents within Russian Orthodoxy.

The show explores Old Believer icons not only as devotional objects but also as complex cultural artifacts shaped by centuries of historical tension. Created under conditions of isolation and persecution, these works developed a refined and deeply symbolic visual language, meticulous in technique and rich in detail. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Justin Willson, Associate Professor of Medieval Art at Yale University, and Elliott Mackin of the Icon Museum and Study Center.

The opening will bring together leading international scholars of icon painting from major European and American museums and academic institutions: Irina Shalina (Senior Researcher, Department of Old Russian Painting, State Russian Museum), Lutz Rickelt (curator, Ikonen-Museum Recklinghausen, Germany), Constanze Runge (curator, Ikonen-Museum Frankfurt, Germany), Liesbeth van Es (curator, Ikonenmuseum Kampen, the Netherlands), the team of The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA), and Wendy Salmond (Chapman University, California).

For the Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection, the upcoming show marks an important next chapter in its growing institutional recognition: the Icon Museum and Study Center in Clinton is the only institution in the United States fully dedicated to the study, preservation, and promotion of icons and Eastern Christian art. Its collection spans nearly two thousand years of history, from early Christian, Byzantine, and Coptic works to art of the modern and contemporary periods.

Previously, all sixty icons from the Oleg Kushnirskiy Collection were shown together for the first time at The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in Minneapolis. Two scholarly catalogues, in Russian and English, were published in 2023 and 2025, compiled by Anna Ivannikova, curator of the Late Russian Icon Painting Collection at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

“Icons: The Old Believers and Their World” will remain on view through August 30, 2026.