Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit

Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit (1927–1998, village of Bystrets, Ivano-Frankivsk region, Ukraine) was a Ukrainian Hutsul artist, poet, writer, folk philosopher, ethnographer and photographer. Representative of naive art. In 1945 she joined the national liberation movement and was arrested in the same year. Paraska was imprisoned for more than 10 years in Stalin’s camps as an ‘enemy of the state’. After release, she returned to the village of Kryvorivnya where she has been a self-appointed rural photographer for about 30 years. The creative legacy of Plytka-Horytsvit is incredibly diverse: poetry, hand-made books, paintings, vytynanky (art form of papercutting), icons, and a large photo archive.