Ivan Honchar Museum was founded in September 1993. Its aims are to help revive national culture, promote ethnic consciousness, and preserve and develop the best traditions of Ukrainian folk art. The Museum is founded on the collection of Ivan Makarovych Honchar (January 1911 - June 18, 1993), who was a prominent statesman, scholar and artist. In the 1960s his collection served as an alternative to the then official ideology and helped spark a renewed interest in national culture.

The Museum's collection consists of 15,000 items from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

The textiles collection numbers nearly 2,500 items, mostly embroidered ceremonial towels, shirts, over­coats, rugs, and examples of embroidery. Most of these items were collected between the early 1950s and the late 1980s. They are important for scholars as objects of re­search and to everyone as objects of art.

The department of creative heritage is an integral part of the Museum's structure. It features a sculpture section which contains nearly 400 items of Ivan Honchar's made from various materials: plaster, clay, bronze, marble, and others. This department also contains a portrait gallery with representations of national heroes and activists, regional folk types from villages, genre com­positions, sketches of monuments, and small-scale objects.

The collection of paintings and drawings made by Ivan Honchar in his decades of travel through Ukraine contains more than 1,000 items of his work. In addition, featured here are eighteen volumes of historical-ethnographic albums created by Honchar combining his many disparate collected items into a collage of things Ukrainian entitled "Ukraine and Ukrainians": early photographs of villagers in national dress, portraits of important national cultural activists, regional landscapes, customs, and artistic and ethnographic monuments.

The personal library of Ivan Honchar contains 2,750 books on Ukrainian studies, from the Books of the Apostles published in 1625 at the Kyiv Lavra and the Oktoikh published in 1640 by the L’viv family Sliozka, to books published in the early 1990s.

The Museum's archive has unusual research value as it contains manuscripts, letters, notes, diaries, and audio as well as photographic materials and other documents of Ivan Honchar.

The collection of folk pottery contains 630 clay items ranging from pots, jugs and bowls to vessels in animal shapes, toys and tiles. They were collected in locales that were active pottery centers at various times between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The largest pottery collection comes from central Ukrainian regions: those bordering the Dnipro as well as the Poltava region. In additional, there are unique tiles from lchnia in the Chernihiv region, tiles by the well-known artist 0lexa Bakhmatiuk, ceramics from the Carpathian Mountains (from Kosiv and Pistyn'), from Podillia and from northern ceramic centers.

Folk paintings occupy a special place in the Museum's collection, in particular the genre "Kozak-Mamai." The icon collection contains mostly folk icons, nearly 500 of them, dating from between the sixteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Other paintings include originals by various masters: V. Krychevs'kyi, V. Makovs'kyi, P. Levchenko, A. Zhdakha, S. Vasyl'kivs'kyi, S. Svitoslavs'kyi, H. Svitlyts'kyi, 0. Murashko, 0. Kurylas, and others. A separate collection of drawings includes the works of K. Trutovs'kyi, 0. Kul'chyts'ka, H. Svitlyts'kyi, H. Narbut, F. Krasyts'kyi, I. Yizhakevych, and contemporary painters H. lakutovych and V. Lopata.

A small but valuable collection of folk music instruments from various regions of Ukraine includes multiple examples of these instruments: kobza (one example dates from 1748), bandura, tsymbaly, sopilka, lira (hurdy-gurdy), zither, koza (bagpipe), floiara, trembita and dudka. The Museum also has a unique collection of pysanky (painted Easter eggs) as well as various objects carved from wood, and metal and glass objects.

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