Craft Around the Country

Janina Myronova’s Playful Stoneware Figures are Worlds Unto Themselves

An exhibition at Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis features nine works by the Ukraine-born artist.

By Jon Spayde
April 13, 2026

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Ceramics

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Photo by John Carlano

Janina Myronova with her menagerie of ceramic figures.

In the window area of the St. Louis–based Duane Reed Gallery, there’s I Love Mushrooms, a 24-inch female figure in a yellow jumpsuit with a bright-red mushroom under one of her stubby little arms; her wide, narrow blue eyes look out on the viewer steadily, and maybe a little suspiciously. She has red discs on her cheeks—bigger and somehow more serious than a clown would have.

There’s also Tiny Neighbor, a 14-inch-tall gray squirrel-like creature, seated on its rump, who also seems to have some wolf DNA. His body is “dressed” in the images of two women, one with white hair and the other with red, who share the mushroom woman’s enigmatic look: intense and focused, but on what? And Ready to Conquer the World is a person in pink racing shorts, blue shirt, blue helmet-ish hat, and flip-flops, who seems about to step into some unknown but cartoonish future.

The figurative sculptures are all done in stoneware with vivid underglaze paint by Janina Myronova, a Ukraine-born ceramist and sculptor who’s having a moment, and gallerist R. Duane Reed is smitten.

Photo by John Carlano

I Love Mushrooms, 2026, stoneware, underglaze, paint, 24 x 14 x 6 in.

“They’re folk-arty, and at the same time, they’re sophisticated,” says Reed of the ceramic figures on display. “There’s communication going on among them. Some of the human figures look like they’re conniving—and so do the animals.”

It’s the Duane Reed Gallery’s first show of the work of Myronova, who draws on the spirits of pre-Columbian art and Slavic folklore to create her chunky, intensely colorful, sly-looking people and animals. The exhibition is relatively modest—with nine pieces that range in height from a few inches to 24—but the big-eyed figures, balanced between the cute and the grotesque, fill the space with all kinds of intentionality and narrative; the ones with additional figures painted on their bodies seem to be little graphic novels all by themselves.

Reed and his colleagues in the gallery first became aware of Myronova about two-and-a-half years ago, he says, when they were scanning the web for new work. “Myronova is the queen of social media,” Reed says, “and I found myself noticing her work. It just grabbed me. It’s hard to dislike.”

Photo by John Carlano

Myronova's works installed at Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis.

Photos by John Carlano

The Sun Horse, 2026, stoneware, underglaze, paint, 12 x 16 x 5 in.
Welcome, 2026, stoneware, underglaze, paint, 6 x 4 x 4.5 in.
Always By Your Side, 2026, stoneware, underglaze, paint, 17.5 x 24 x 9 in.

Not long after, Reed had a chance to meet the artist when she was doing a workshop on the nearby campus of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. “I mentioned that we had been stalking her for a while, and she said that she had been stalking us, too,” says Reed. “We decided to do something together, and eventually came up with a plan for a small show.”

After the current exhibition closes on April 18, Reed hopes to begin planning a way for the gallery to feature Myronova’s larger works. “She’s able to accomplish these massive pieces, six feet or taller,” he says. “The current show’s grouping is fun and intriguing, but I very much want to see how those big figures do on their own.”

While Reed works out his next Myronova moves, the artist is busy showing her quirky characters elsewhere, including at the Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia as part of a group show entitled Delights (closing April 26), and at the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana (in a solo show called Folktales and Fanfare, running until August 15). And Myronova, who’s currently in residence at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia, will mount a solo exhibition there that’s slated to run from January 14 to March 28, 2027.

Photo by John Carlano

Tiny Neighbor, 2026, stoneware, underglaze, paint, 14.5 x 10 x 13.5 in.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.

Learn more about the exhibition and the artist online.

Exhibition Website Artist Instagram

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