Ivan's younger brother Anton Luckievič ran the new museum together with the engineer Liavon Dubeikauski. Their goal was specific and pointed: to gather the material and intangible culture of Belarusians, with particular emphasis on the centuries when Belarusians shaped the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In a city ruled by interwar Poland, where Belarusian was a language of villages rather than government, the museum was an argument that this culture had a history worth its own institution. The first inventory in 1922 catalogued 106 folklore items, 797 hand drawings, 126 pieces of armor, and hundreds of tiles and bricks. By 1933 the collection had grown to include a 200-item prehistoric section spanning Palaeolithic through Iron Age, religious objects, wooden sculpture, and a sigillographic collection of 103 stamps. By 1937 the museum held 4,228 items - among them 2,492 numismatic pieces and a library of 10,555 volumes.

Vilnius's borders moved more often than its people did. In September 1939, after Soviet forces took the city, members of the museum committee - including Anton Luckievič - were arrested. The museum did not formally close, but it stopped functioning from October 1939 to July 1940. Then it was reorganized as a subsidiary of the new Academy of Sciences of the Lithuanian SSR. It reopened in October 1940 with the ethnographer Yan Shutovich appointed director, a post he held through the German occupation from February 1941 to November 1944. He kept the collection together through three years of Nazi rule, no small thing for a museum dedicated to a Slavic minority. When the Soviets returned in 1944, his thanks was arrest and deportation to the Gulag.

Juozas Pertulis took over briefly. A liquidation committee formed, including the deputy Commissar of People's Education and the historian Albinas Daukša-Paškevičius from the Lithuanian Communist Party's Central Committee. The committee finished its work in June 1945 with a tidy bureaucratic logic: items with text in Belarusian went to Belarus, items linked to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania stayed in Lithuanian institutions, and a portion went to central museums in Moscow. The collection that Ivan Luckievič had spent his short life building, that his brother and a small circle of intellectuals had grown for two decades, was dispersed across three Soviet republics in a few months. Most of the artifacts that wound up in Belarus passed into the Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk. Many others have never been precisely located since.

In 2001, the activist Siaržuk Vituška launched an initiative to restore the museum. The founding group - Halina Voitsik, Siaržuk and Liudevika Vituška, Siarhei Dubaviets, Tatiana Poklad - registered an NGO called the Ivan Lutskievitch Belarusian Museum in Lithuania. For two decades it operated mostly without a building. Then in 2021 the Vilnius City Municipality granted the museum a house at Vilniaus Street 20, and on 4 August that year the first exhibition opened, featuring four Belarusian women artists: Zoia Koush, Zhana Gladko, Sviatlana Petushkova, and Aliesia Zhytkuevitch. The director today is Liudvika Kardzis. A second exhibition celebrated 115 years of Naša Niva and 100 years of the museum. The reborn institution holds book launches, concerts of Belarusian musicians like Zmitar Bartosik and Andrej Hadanovich, poetry festivals, and theatre - much of it now sustained by Belarusian writers and artists who fled Lukashenko's crackdown after 2020. Vilnius, once again, has become a Belarusian cultural capital in exile.

From 15 October to 12 December 2021, the Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk hosted an exhibition for the museum's centenary - displaying artifacts that had once belonged to Luckievič's collection and had been transferred to Belarus during the 1945 liquidation. The exhibition was a kind of accidental reunion: objects gathered by one man in early 20th-century Vilna, scattered by Soviet committee in 1945, briefly reassembled in 2021 to mark a century since their first museum opened. The originals are mostly in Minsk now, beyond easy reach of the Vilnius successor. But they exist. They were preserved. The brothers Luckievič, Yan Shutovich, the activists who registered an NGO in 2001 and waited two decades for a building - all of them are part of the same long argument that this culture deserves a museum. The argument continues.