Alexandra Rozenman

Last updated
Alexandra Rozenman
Native name
Александра Михайловна Розенман
Born (1971-03-11) March 11, 1971 (age 52)
Moscow, Russia
OccupationContemporary American Artist & Art Educator
NationalityAmerican
Education
Relatives Bella Rosenfeld Chagall
Website
www.alexandrarozenman.com

Alexandra Rozenman is a contemporary Russian-American painter, graphic designer, and book illustrator. She is recognized for her works where visual artifacts are used as the means for telling intricate, idiosyncratic, compelling stories. Her work has been on exhibit in the leading museums, including the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in her native Moscow, and deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Rozenman lives in Boston and works in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Contents

Early life and education

Rozenman was born in Moscow, Russia (then Soviet Union). Her early influences included an art school for gifted child artists at the Pushkin Museum - at that time the only venue for Western art shows in Moscow, both ancient and modern. Nina N. Kofman, an art educator, ran an art school for very young children at the museum, actively using its collection as a study aide. Several of Rozenman's works from that period have been shown at the international shows of children's art (in Russia, Japan, India, and Finland, among others). Later on, Rozenman studied with several dissident artists who went on to become famous in the West, including Grisha Bruskin. When Rozenman's family emigrated from Russia to the US in 1989, she continued her art education there, participating in the Studio Semester in New York Program at SUNY Empire State College (she graduated in 1995), and proceeding to Boston, where she earned her MFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts [1] at Tufts University in 1997.

Career

Rozenman worked in many places in the US, including the East Coast (Washington, New York City, and Boston), West Coast (Los Angeles), and Mid-West (East Lansing, Michigan, and Saint Paul, Minnesota), striving to capture her life experience, and developing a unique, highly personal way of expressing the American reality of today. She straddles the distinctly European world with recognizable Russian and Jewish influences (mostly of Marc Chagall, whose first wife, Bella Chagall, frequently depicted as a flying female figure in his early paintings, is Rozenman's great-aunt) and the uniquely American experience of freedom and thirst for deeper meaning of life interwoven with art. Today, Rozenman is a core member of the Fountain Street Gallery.

Paintings

Over three decades, starting as a child artist, Rozenman went through several periods, capturing life experiences in images. They reflect, on the one hand, her highly personal accounts of love, loss, and search for beauty, and on the other hand—the environments of Russia, California, New York City, Boston, Midwest, and Europe.

In one of her recent series of paintings, called Transplanted , Rozenman superimposes her own images with iconic works of European and American artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Breugel, Turner, Monet, Matisse and Diebenkorn. This series, a part of which has been on display in Boston in 2013, represents the artist's search for a personal place in the story of the world art.

Graphics

Rozenman started working on small graphics format in her teens, selling art from the sidewalks of Moscow busy Arbat Street thoroughfare. She returned to this form recently, partly for the purposes of book illustration.

Book illustration

Rozenman illustrated several books, including "Two Hands Clapping" a collaborative book of drawings with the British poet Grace Andreacchi (Andromache Books, London, 2009). Grace Andreacchi also published the video Two Hands Clapping on YouTube.

She has recently finished illustrating "Sticky Leaves" by Mikhail Epstein, a Russian-American literary theorist and critical thinker.

Art school

Since 2012, Rozenman has been running a popular art school with classes for children and adults in Allston, and later in Somerville, Massachusetts, offering classes, seminars, and workshops in experimental and classical painting and drawing.

Principal solo exhibitions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ursula von Rydingsvard</span> American sculptor (born 1942)

Ursula von Rydingsvard is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for creating large-scale works influenced by nature, primarily using cedar and other forms of timber.

Grace Andreacchi is an American-born author known for her blend of poetic language and modernism with a post-modernist sensibility. Andreacchi is active as a novelist, poet and playwright.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anne Ryan</span> American painter

Anne Ryan (1889–1954) was an American Abstract Expressionist artist associated with the New York School. Her first contact with the New York City avant-garde came in 1941 when she joined the Atelier 17, a famous printmaking workshop that the British artist Stanley William Hayter had established in Paris in the 1930s and then brought to New York when France fell to the Nazis. The great turning point in Ryan's development occurred after the war, in 1948. She was 57 years old when she saw the collages of Kurt Schwitters at the Rose Fried Gallery, in New York City, in 1948. She right away dedicated herself to this newly discovered medium. Since Anne Ryan was a poet, according to Deborah Solomon, in Kurt Schwitters’s collages “she recognized the visual equivalent of her sonnets – discrete images packed together in an extremely compressed space.” When six years later Ryan died, her work in this medium numbered over 400 pieces.

Susanna J. Coffey is an American artist and educator. She is the F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and works in New York City. She was elected a member the National Academy of Design in 1999.

The Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) is a privately owned museum whose stated aim is "to celebrate the labor of artists whose work would be displayed and appreciated in no other forum". It was originally in Dedham, Massachusetts and is currently in Boston, Massachusetts. Its permanent collection includes over 700 pieces of "art too bad to be ignored", 25 to 35 of which are on public display at any one time.

Stephen DiRado is an American photographer. His work is mostly black-and-white, and he makes frequent use of large-format cameras. He is most noted for his portraiture, night-astronomical photography, and semi-composed group photography, and for the extensive length of his projects.

Taylor Davis born in the United States of America, rose to recognition as an artist and a teacher. She was best known for her innovative wood sculptures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eleanor Norcross</span> American painter

Ella Augusta "Eleanor" Norcross was an American painter who studied under William Merritt Chase and Alfred Stevens. She lived the majority of her adult life in Paris, France, as an artist and collector and spent the summers in her hometown of Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Norcross painted Impressionist portraits and still lifes, and is better known for her paintings of genteel interiors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Howardena Pindell</span> American painter

Howardena Pindell is an American artist, curator, and educator. She is known as a painter and mixed media artist, her work explores texture, color, structures, and the process of making art; it is often political, addressing the intersecting issues of racism, feminism, violence, slavery, and exploitation. She is known for the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her artwork; she has created abstract paintings, collages, "video drawings," and "process art."

Jason Berger was a Boston landscape painter, connected to Boston Expressionism. He painted from nature, en plein air, and used favorite motifs in abstract paintings, referred to as "studio paintings". He, also, enjoyed woodcuts which were predominantly printed in black and white. Known for his humor, love of jazz, and his upbeat approach to painting, “his work expresses the joy of life and love of place”.

Ellen Gallagher is an American artist. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is held in the permanent collections of many major museums. Her media include painting, works on paper, film and video. Some of her pieces refer to issues of race, and may combine formality with racial stereotypes and depict "ordering principles" society imposes.

Suzanne McClelland is a New York-based artist best known for abstract work based in language, speech, and sound.

Laylah Ali (born 1968) is a contemporary visual artist known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format.

Boston Expressionism is an arts movement marked by emotional directness, dark humor, social and spiritual themes, and a tendency toward figuration strong enough that Boston Figurative Expressionism is sometimes used as an alternate term to distinguish it from abstract expressionism, with which it overlapped.

Jon Imber (1950–2014) was an American artist.

Ann Pibal is an American painter who makes geometric compositions using acrylic paint on aluminum panel. The geometric intensity is one of the key characteristics that defines her paintings.

Craig Stockwell is a visual artist who paints large, colorful, abstract paintings. He served (2013-20) as the Director of the MFA in Visual Arts program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art.

Liza Sylvestre is an American visual artist born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is known for detailed abstract mixed media paintings and drawings. Her current work explores new media such as installation and video art. Much of her work revolves around our sensory perceptions and misconceptions of the world around.

Joyce Reopel (1933–2019) was an American painter, draughtswoman and sculptor who worked in pencil, aquatint, silver- and goldpoint, and an array of old master media. A Boris Mirski Gallery veteran, from 1959–1966, she was known for her refined skills and virtuosity. She was also one of very few women in the early group of Boston artists that included fellow artist and husband Mel Zabarsky, Hyman Bloom, Barbara Swan, Jack Levine, Marianna Pineda, Harold Tovish and others who helped overcome Boston's conservative distaste for the avant-garde, occasionally female, and often Jewish artists later classified as Boston expressionists. Unique to New England, Boston Expressionism has had lasting local and national influence, and is now in its third generation.

Pao Houa Her is a Hmong-American photographer whose works are primarily centered around the history and lived experiences of the Hmong people. Her's photography consists of greenery and geographic images. She is also a professor at the University of Minnesota and teaches Introduction to Photography.

References

  1. "Alexandra Rozenman". Saatchi Art. Retrieved 2021-05-22.