Alexandra Rozenman

Contemporary Russian-American artist

The basics

Quick Facts

Intro

Contemporary Russian-American artist

Places

United States of America Russia

Artist

Work field

Arts

Gender

Female

Birth

1971, Moscow, Moscow Governorate, Russian Empire, Duchy of Moscow

Age

54 years

The details

Biography

Alexandra Rozenman is a contemporary Russian-American artist, active in the fields of painting, graphics, and book illustration. 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, MA. Rozenman lives in Boston and works in Somerville, MA.

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 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. Recent samples can be seen in the Grace Andreacchi book video below.

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.

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, MA, offering classes, seminars, and workshops in experimental and classical painting and drawing; see the Art School99 web site.