Alexandra Rozenman, painter, illustrator, and teacher
Her early art education with dissident artists, what happened when she moved in with Matisse, and why she loves to teach art
The Flood in the Music School, by Alexandra Rozenman
On first glance, Alexandra Rozenman’s paintings have a childlike quality, but on further examination they are sophisticated, political, and draw on more than 200 years of art history in her own unique ways.
Alexandra’s path to being a painter, collage artist, illustrator, gallery curator, and art school proprietor and teacher started when she was five years old and living in what was then the Soviet Union. That’s when her education in art history began. She was in a children’s art group at the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts and her father took her to museums and art galleries weekly.
She was raised by “free thinker and art lover” parents who encouraged her artistic interests and rebellious nature. When it became time to take an exam and submit her portfolio to apply to art school (at age 10!) she realized that formal art school would constrain her creative spirit. Instead, she became a student of dissident artist Grisha Bruskin, who was teaching art to earn a living and would go on to become a famous conceptualist artist. Of Bruskin, Alexandra says, “Watching him work on his Alefbet series in the 1980s inspired my imagination and gave me an amazing feeling about freedom of imagination.”
As a teenager, Alexandra became immersed in the 1980s underground art scene in Moscow. It was an exciting time for artists because Gorbachev had introduced an “openness” policy (i.e., glasnost) that gave them a bit more freedom. But that artistic life didn’t last for Alexandra. Her family decided to emigrate to the US, and she left her art community behind to start over. Her new life in the US included stints in New York City, Boston, Minneapolis, Virginia, and back to Boston where she now has a studio and runs Art School 99.
You recently had a show at the Fountain Gallery in Boston. The painting that stayed with me was the one of the music school.
It’s about fragility, being unstable, and war. That painting is the second piece on that theme. I sold the first one.