Between Memory and Reinvention

Notes from a Life in Art, Exile, Teaching, and Continuous Transformation

I grew up in Moscow in a family where art and history were always present, even when politics and uncertainty pressed heavily against everyday life. My great-grandfather was killed during Stalin’s Great Purge, and the stories surrounding that loss stayed with my family for generations. At the same time, my parents surrounded me with books, music, and visual culture. Art was never treated as decoration in our home — it was a way of understanding the world and surviving it.

As a child, I studied with underground Soviet artists who became my first real teachers. One of the most influential among them was Grisha Bruskin. Watching him work changed the way I thought about images and symbols. He painted in a language that felt intellectual, emotional, and coded all at once. That experience shaped my understanding that painting could carry memory, history, and personal mythology simultaneously. I never fully abandoned that idea, even as my style evolved over the years.

Waiting for a Cookie Monster on a Half-Moon of the Night…, 28x30”, oil on canvas, 2021

Leaving One World Behind

When I emigrated to the United States, I faced the same disorientation many immigrants experience. I didn’t speak English fluently, and suddenly I was rebuilding my identity from the ground up. In Russia, I had already established myself as an artist. In America, I had to begin again.

Looking back, that transition forced me inward. It pushed me toward a more conceptual understanding of art and made me question not only what I painted, but why I painted at all. There is a strange freedom in losing familiarity. You begin paying attention differently. You learn how to observe yourself while simultaneously observing the world around you.

Eventually I moved to Boston, and that city became deeply important to me. I found a creative home there, especially through the Fountain Street Gallery community. Being surrounded by other working artists changed my perspective. It reminded me that art is not made in isolation. Conversation, collaboration, criticism, and shared experience all matter.

Painting as Storytelling

Over time, I became increasingly interested in the relationship between painting and storytelling — not only visual storytelling, but theatrical and emotional storytelling as well.

For many years I worked primarily in abstraction, especially while living in New York City in the early 90s. It was the move to New England that brought a horizon line back into my work first and the narrative later.

During the pandemic I experienced another shift. I began returning to figurative imagery and narrative spaces. Some of these paintings carried echoes of Edward Hopper, Soviet memories, cityscapes, and imagined interiors. Others explored humor and irony in ways I had not previously allowed myself to use.

I started creating series that blended cultural references with personal reflections, including works inspired by blind dates, music, memory, and Russian modernism. In many ways, these paintings became small theatrical stages — places where fragments of different worlds could briefly coexist.

A Bubble Cat, watercolor and ink on paper, 12x9, 2020 - $500

Continuity, Rupture, and the Echoes of History

One recurring theme in my work is continuity and discontinuity — the feeling that history is constantly breaking apart and rebuilding itself in new forms. I often return to Kazimir Malevich and the Russian avant-garde because I’m fascinated by how revolutionary artistic ideas can later become fragmented, politicized, forgotten, or rediscovered.

Some of my paintings intentionally place older artistic languages into contemporary environments, asking what still survives and what has been lost. I’m interested in that tension between permanence and disappearance. Even when cultures collapse or transform, traces remain behind. Art carries those traces forward.

At the same time, I don’t want my work to become overly solemn. Humor matters to me. Irony matters to me. Sometimes the absurdity of modern life says more than direct political commentary ever could.

The Return to Collage

During and after lockdown, I returned to collage work in a much deeper way. I began combining painting, drawing, printmaking, handmade papers, and sketchbook fragments into layered compositions that felt almost musical to me.

These collages became less about polished perfection and more about rhythm, intuition, and discovery. I’ve always loved the physicality of mixed media — the way one surface can hold contradiction, accident, memory, and reconstruction all at once. There is something liberating about allowing materials to speak back to you instead of forcing them into rigid control.

In many ways, collage mirrors contemporary life itself: fragmented, overlapping, unfinished, emotional, and constantly rearranging itself into new meanings.

Teaching as a Creative Practice

Another important part of my creative life has been teaching. Founding Art School 99 in Somerville allowed me to create the kind of environment I always wanted for students: structured enough to provide guidance, but open enough to encourage experimentation and individuality.

I work with adults as well as children, and I try to help students discover their own visual language rather than simply imitate someone else’s technique. To me, teaching and making art are deeply connected practices. Both require curiosity, vulnerability, patience, and trust in the creative process.

I’ve come to realize that some people enter an art classroom carrying years of hesitation and self-doubt. Helping them reconnect with imagination can be just as meaningful as creating a finished painting.

Intermission, 16x20”, oil on canvas, 2019

Collaboration and Creative Energy

Collaboration has also become increasingly important in recent years. I’ve worked with musicians, writers, performers, and filmmakers, and I’m drawn to projects where different artistic disciplines overlap. Those collaborations often push me into unfamiliar territory, which is usually where the most interesting work begins. Creativity becomes alive when it stops feeling isolated.

I enjoy the unpredictability that collaboration introduces. Another person’s rhythm, language, or artistic instinct can suddenly redirect your entire process in unexpected ways.

Collaborating With Other Creative People

In October 2023, I made live drawings with FMRJE, featured on YouTube. Parts of this work

appeared in recent collages at the Lichtundfire gallery in New York. Full playlist here:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_kaeOq55C89uHgEWjiq-Y1E4K0VRtIzB

Collaborating across disciplines continues to inspire my practice and open new possibilities in my art. I look forward to deepening these connections and exploring ways in which creative relationships continue to shape my journey as an artist.

This experience was challenging and fun at the same time because there were artists trying to paint the music and the musicians, or ignore both and just paint the energy.

I had to figure out which way to go. I ended up going in all three directions. It was very inspiring.

I have done this twice, in 2023 and again in February 2024, and it is still work in progress.

I was surrounded by all these musicians, each playing a different instrument, with video cameras set up all over the room. I did not have an easel; I had a table and worked on 11" x 14" paper. I had to work fast because the music was fast. I would start a lot of pieces and not finish them and go to the next page. At the end, I would have a pile of unfinished pieces.

The reworked pieces came out pretty great and were included in the Lichtundfire gallery show in New York City, in Summer 2024.

Alexandra’s Luftmensch, currently on view in the Project Space at Kingston Gallery, presents a haunting and imaginative series of narrative paintings set in a fictional Eastern European village following an apocalyptic catastrophe. Drawing from her background as a Moscow-born artist trained among Soviet underground dissidents, Rozenman blends personal memory, folklore, science fiction, and art historical references into richly textured works exploring identity, displacement, resilience, and enduring love. The exhibition centers on lovers who survive a devastating explosion only to awaken without their original faces or heads, yet remain emotionally connected, creating a surreal meditation on transformation and human continuity shaped in part by the ongoing war in Ukraine and the artist’s own cultural roots.

Why Art Still Matters

At this point in my life, I no longer see art as something separate from ordinary existence. Painting, collage, teaching, memory, conversation, even uncertainty — all of it flows together.

The art world itself has changed dramatically since the 1980s. Technology, social media, and digital culture have transformed the way we create and communicate. But despite all those changes, I still believe the essential human need for art remains the same.

Art continues to give form to emotion, memory, longing, humor, grief, and imagination. As long as people continue searching for meaning and connection, they will continue searching for art.