National Museum of Decorative Arts of Ukraine The National Museum of Decorative Arts of Ukraine is one of the largest art museums in Ukraine. Its collection includes more than 80 thousand works of traditional folk and professional decorative art of Ukraine of the fifteenth and early twenty-first centuries. The history of the museum's collection dates back to 1899, when the first public museum, the City Museum of Antiquities and Arts, was opened in Kyiv. It was housed in a specially built building on Oleksandrivska Street (now 6 Hrushevskoho Street). In the following decades, the museum changed its name several times: Kyiv Art, Industry, and Science Museum named after Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich, the First State Museum, the Taras Shevchenko All-Ukrainian Historical Museum, and the Kyiv State Museum of Ukrainian Art. In 1936, its historical and archaeological collection formed the basis of the State Historical Museum (now the National Museum of History of Ukraine), and in 1954 the collection of folk art and art industry was separated. As a branch, it was placed on the territory of the Kyiv Cave Monastery in the former metropolitan's quarters and the adjacent Annunciation House Church, architectural monuments of the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries.