The Merage JCC is honored to present Mila Gokhman: Light & Shadow, an exhibition devoted to a selection of art and design by a remarkable, 88-year-old Ukrainian-American artist of soaring creativity, who resides in Orange County. Vivacious, resilient, and technically adventurous in her approach, Gokhman had achieved, with tenacity and against all odds, a measure of success in Eastern Europe during the Soviet era, as well as after Ukraine gained independence in 1991. As a Jewish, self-taught artist unaffiliated with the official academies who initially worked in the unusual medium of leather, Gokhman was an outsider who struggled for recognition. Nevertheless, between 1972 and 2000, her highly inventive work was featured in more than a half-dozen solo shows in major museums, former palaces, and other major venues in Saint Petersburg, Tallinn (Estonia), and her native Kyiv. It was also was extensively covered and lauded by the media.

From its inception, Gokhman’s art defied the dictates of Soviet Socialist Realism--the demands for a realistic art devoted to glorifying factory workers, farmers, and others toiling in the service of the state. She created instead an art that was abstract, improvisational, and expressive of self. Gokhman found refuge from the repressive Soviet regime in nature, poetry, and music, and she communicated the uplift and healing she derived from these sources of inspiration through the lyrical, free-flowing forms of her art. In the intimately-scaled, densely worked panel pieces she began to create in 1967, narrow strips of leather are variously layered, twisted, woven, set in radiating patterns, looped, and coiled, at times springing half an inch or more above the picture surface. Leather was a scarce, luxury material strictly controlled by the government and in 1972, Gokhman began to design leather jewelry, belts, purses, and the like for leading designers of the Soviet-run Kyiv Fashion House, receiving neither official recognition or payment for her work, but compensated with leather with which to create her panel pieces as well as autonomous design work. Gokhman’s leather wearables and accessories, some abstract and some floral in design, exude an ease and sensuality and stand as fully-realized works of art. 

In 1977, Gokhman expanded her artistic practice further, beginning to create collages of meticulously cut and pasted papers that radiate joy and movement. Yuliia Shlenko, the Chief Curator of the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, recently recalled that when a retrospective of her multidisciplinary art was presented at the museum in 1993, “The exhibition of Mila Gokhman’s works became a real sensation and an extremely bright event in the museum space of Kyiv.”  Her work was a source of national pride.

In 2000, seeking wider exposure for art and hoping for sales to alleviate her life of poverty, Gokhman left Kyiv and moved to Southern California.  A small bribe given to a Ukrainian immigration official enabled her to carry an astonishing amount of her most prized art with her. Lacking art world connections, she has spent the last two decades working in obscurity. Yet, she has continued to make art on a daily basis.

In 2021, as vaccines proliferated, Gokhman produced a stunning series of 15 paper collages, Light & Shadow, which, as she said, express her “spiritual opposition to the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, while conveying the joys of liberation and hope.” In the Light & Shadow pieces, a wide variety of plain, patterned, and differently textured papers are dynamically arrayed across the paper surface, conjuring plays of space and depth. Touches of watercolor are seen. Gokhman envisioned the series both as exhibition materials and as large-scale illustrations in a book, where the images would be interspersed with poetry in both English and Russian by an international roster of writers, among them Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Wilke, William Blake, and Juan Ramon Jimenez, that have inspired her through her lifetime.

While the exhibition’s title, Light & Shadow, conveys the light of hope, the shadow cast by the Russian invasion of Ukraine is extremely dark and weighs heavily on Gokhman, many of whose friends remain situated in Kyiv.

Mila Gokhman's artistic production over the course of the past half-century is astounding in its originality, vision, and technical perfection. Her perseverance through years of seclusion and frustrated aspirations is no less inspiring, the more so for the life force that radiates from her art. The spirit with which she defied the Soviet system 50 years ago burns in her still.

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