Mila Gokhman

1960: I received a bachelor's degree in civil engineering.

1966: My passion for art led me to abandon my engineering profession. I began my artistic history with flower arrangements using natural and artificial flowers. Then, as a self-taught artist, I created my own approach to different kinds of materials. I worked with wood, clay, precious stones, metal, fabrics, etc.

1967 (January 6-7): When visiting a friend in Tallinn, Estonia, I met her neighbor, Veronica Kaevandes, an artisan who worked in a leather factory. She gifted me a bag of leather scraps and a bottle of latex glue. The next day, I found cardboard and started making art. I consider this (the 7th) my birthday as an artist and celebrate it with my friends every year. For many years thereafter, leather was my preferred material. I developed my own techniques and produced a variety of unique and beautiful leather works, creating my own leather universe to the delight of my viewers. They included panel pieces, jewelry, garment accessories and ornamentation, purses, book covers and folders for documents, and so on. My work was totally apart from Ukrainian traditions and was therefore almost criminal. For many years, my works were not accepted in official exhibitions in Ukraine.

The first of my leather pieces was called, The Girl on the Sunny Background. The shape of the body was my own (seen in the mirror). Then there were "landscapes," ornaments, decorative panels--a world of fantasy and life transformed in art.

1972: I began to collaborate with Kyiv Fashion House, which was one of the best fashion houses in the former Soviet Union, taking part in creating collections for international shows and festivals. My creations were shown in many countries and received international prizes. I worked with the renowned fashion designer Mepen Hertz of the Kyiv Fashion House and other leading designers, until the early 1990s.

1973: My first solo show included leather collages, floral designs, and early leather jewelry and accessories. It was held in the Flower Pavilion (Conservatory of Model Floriculture), Tallinn, Estonia.

1977: I turned to paper collages. Most of them have strong connections with music. Lines and colors express sounds. There are series of works – "Jazz," "Blues," "Symphonies," "Ballets,” etc. – associated with the musical world.

1980 (March): This was my equivalent of Aleksandr Pushkin's Boldino Spring, a one-month period I spent in Tallinn, Estonia, in which I made a great many leather pieces. An official at one of the fashion houses I worked for gave me a supply of fine leather imported from Holland and France with which to create work for my own jewelry collection. I made this official several pieces in return. (In the Soviet Union at the time, you were unable to buy leather; it was reserved for state-run factories and institutions.)

1981: Plasticity and Color, a major solo show of my work in leather, was mounted for 5 months in the Yelagin Palace, St. Petersburg, a Palladian villa that served as a summer palace during the reign of Alexander I. Enormous posters advertising the show surrounded the park.

1986: The first major article on my work appeared in the important Moscovite magazine Dekorativenoye Iskusstvo (Decorative Art), written by Irina Uvarova.

1989: My first serious show in Kyiv, Plastic Etude: Fantasia, was held in the Museum of History (Podol; the ancient part of the city), after 22 years of work. I showed leather reliefs and leather jewelry. I designed the installation, using framed linen squares as grounds for the leather panels. I covered the windows with silks dyed in different shades and colors that connected with the colors of my leather jewelry sets. The important politician Petro Shelest [First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic] attended the opening with a delegation of directors of American editing houses. One of the Americans was ready to buy the whole show, but I was not ready to sell.

1991: Flowers in Fashion and Interiors, a brief solo exhibition of works in silk and leather, was held in "Ukraina" National Palace of Arts, Kyiv.

1993: 26 Long Years, a major retrospective of the full range of my artistic production, was held at the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, Kyiv. This was a huge show: one hall had my leatherwork, one had paper collages, and one had a mixture of the two. The Chief Curator of the Taras Shevchenko National Museum, Yuliia Shlenko, recalled in February 2022, “The 1993 exhibition of Mila Gokhman’s works became a real sensation and an extremely bright event in the museum space of Kyiv”. At both the opening and closing, chairs were set up in the space of the exhibition for concerts by renowned muscians (among them, Oleg Kudryashov, flautist and conductor of the Kyiv Chamber Orchestra). At each event, the concert was followed by a fashion show of my jewelry and accessories.

1994-1998: Several important, copiously illustrated articles on my art and design were published in the Eastern European press.  The most comprehensive analysis and most beautifully illustrated of these was Lyudmila Svershkova's Spirit Lives Wherever it Chooses, published in Egupets Literary Almanac #4, 1998, Institute of Jewish Studies, Kyiv. The article was written shortly before my 1993 retrospective, 26 Long Years, by a writer and intellectual based in Kyiv who has remained my closest friend to the present day.

1998-2000: I designed knitted clothing for myself, friends, and celebrated Urainian theatre and movie actress, Raisa S. Nedashkovskaya.  In 2000, I served as costume director for a one-woman theatrical performance by Nedashkovskaya, who was awarded the People's Artist of Ukraine honor in 1993. She performed Taras Shevchenko's poem, Don't Ask Your Fate, in the Kyiv Planetarium Theater.

2000 (January): My last solo exhibition, Shell in Thorns – a farewell to my native city – took place at the Kyiv Planetarium Gallery. It was a career retrospective. Scores of people attended – artists, musicians, actors, scientists, TV producers, and so on. It was indeed the rewarding outcome of my inspirational art and thirty three years of hard work.

2000 (March): I moved to the USA. For several years, I was taking care of my mother and was unable to work as an artist.  But I found a new interest in making bead jewelry using different materials. I produce only unique, one-of-a-kind works, finding new ways to combine and harmonize different materials and colors.

2007-2015: For many years, I took part in the juried group shows of the San Clemente Art Association, the Anaheim Art Association, and the Orange County Fair. I received various prizes, including “Best of Show,” “Auxilia d’Arts,” and “First Place” in the mixed media category for my leather and paper collages. In 2008, I received the “Staff Award” in the O.C. Fair.

2010-2011: I took part in a two-person show at Grand Central Art Gallery in Santa Ana, a satellite space of California State University, Fullerton (November 6, 2010-January 2, 2011).

2019 (November):  I took part in a group show, Cafe Europa: Holocaust Survivor Arts Collective, organized by Jewish Federation and Family Services in Laguna Woods, California, where my paper collages and bead jewelry were displayed.  It was through this exhibition that I met several individuals who have taken renewed interest in my work.  They have organized this website, written and arranged for the publication of numerous recent articles, and set up photo shoots to help me realize my vision as well as my goal of  reemerging in the art world.

2020 (June and October):  I met Los Angeles photographer Michele Mattei, whose "Women of Influence" series of portraits of women of advanced years who have shaped contemporary culture were featured in the exhibition, Fabulous! Portraits by Michele Mattei, held at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., in 2012.  Mattei shot many portrait photographs of me in June 2020.  In October 2020, I returned to her studio to produce photographic images for an exhibition I envisioned during the pandemic called Mila's Garden.  It was to include leather pieces, collages, and jewelry on nature themes, as well as photographs of nude models wearing my beaded jewelry and headdresses of my design.  

2021: I produced a series of 15 cut and pasted paper pieces, each with additions of watercolor--the Light & Shadow Series--that expressed my spiritual opposition to the COVID-19 pandemic and celebrated the development of vaccines, which brought the promise of liberation and hope.  See the "Light & Shadow Show" tab above for more.