Olga Oleksenko once presented jewelry to clients at one of the world’s most prestigious boutiques. Today, as director of the Strong & Precious Art Foundation, she is presenting Ukrainian jewelers and jewelry to the world—with her next stop planned during Miami Art Week.

Oleksenko and the Strong & Precious Art Foundation will debut its Design Miami presentation during Miami Art Week in December. The exhibition, Doloni: Objects of Presence, examines how collectible objects including jewelry can become vessels of personal and collective identity.

Doloni is named after the Ukrainian word for “palms,” and Oleksenko curated it with Ukrainian collector and philanthropist Liudmyla Pyshna. The exhibit will include jewelry artists including Nomis and Inesa Kovalova.

“I believe that jewellery art holds its rightful place in global culture alongside sculpture and painting. I am drawn to pieces with a strong sense of storytelling that resonate with history. For me, jewelry goes beyond adornment. I see it as a true art object,” Oleksenko says.

To understand her story, Oleksenko says consider the former Soviet Union and its complexity. She was born in Kazakhstan, finished high school there, and moved to Kyiv to attend college. She continued to graduate school, earning a master’s degree in international economics in 1998.

Fine jewelry wasn’t present in her life to a large degree, she says. Wearing pieces made of amber, malachite, and jasper, her grandmother was her most significant jewelry influence. Her favorite jewelry pieces were brooches, which she wore in dozens of ways.

“To this day, I have never found brooches difficult to wear. They remain my favorite type of jewelry, and I believe that freedom and confidence came directly from my grandmother,” she says.

Oleksenko went to work in banking, but realized within her first year that finance was not her true calling. She wanted to do something creative, she says, and her career needed to include ideas, people, and emotion.

In 1999, Oleksenko joined Joint Venture BB, one of Ukraine’s leading distributors of luxury beauty brands. For five years, she worked as a brand manager for fragrance and cosmetics houses, learning how luxury companies are built.

By 2003, she had become a mother for the first time and Oleksenko says she reexamined her priorities. That is when jewelry found her.

“A friend told me that Van Cleef & Arpels and Piaget were about to open their first boutiques in Kyiv. Initially, I was invited to become brand manager for Piaget. The conversation quickly evolved, and I was offered the opportunity to lead the opening of both boutiques,” Oleksenko says.

Opening a boutique was unlike anything else Oleksenko had done to that point. Everything had to be created from scratch: the team, the client experience, the culture, and the standards. While Piaget’s store closed, she stayed with Van Cleef, eventually moving into the role of brand ambassador so she could balance work with her growing family of three children.

“At Van Cleef & Arpels, I learned that jewelry is never just about gemstones or precious metals. Every creation tells a story. Every detail has meaning. That philosophy has stayed with me ever since,” Oleksenko says.

Oleksenko says all of that changed in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Van Cleef closed, and Kyiv became a war zone. That is when she decided to act, and the Strong & Precious Art Foundation was born to ensure the world would know Ukrainian artists and designers were still working and creating.

“For the first time in many years, I found myself asking not what I wanted to do next, but how I could use my international network and everything I had learned over nearly two decades to help my country,” she says. “I reached out to Thomas Faerber, cofounder of GemGenève, with a simple idea to create an exhibition dedicated to contemporary Ukrainian jewelry. He immediately said yes.”

Today, Strong & Precious is an international platform supporting contemporary Ukrainian jewelry through exhibitions, grants, educational initiatives, and cultural partnerships. Its artists and Oleksenko herself have presented Ukrainian work at GemGenève, Sotheby’s, NYC Jewelry Week, and other international venues.

“For me, the Foundation has never been only about jewelry. It is about cultural diplomacy. It is about giving artists visibility and helping restore Ukraine’s rightful place on the world’s cultural map,” she says. “Looking back, I sometimes think I spent my entire career preparing for a role I never knew I would have. Today, I cannot imagine doing anything else.”

(Photos courtesy of the Strong & Precious Art Foundation)

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