Painter and printmaker Lea Goldman is a Holocaust survivor born in Romania who was raised in Russia, Mongolia, and Israel before emigrating in 1975 to the US. Her work is narrative, with close attention to abstract elements such as composition, texture, and form, often resembling large storybook pages. As a nomad, Lea developed a deep interest in multicultural traditions, legends, and folklore, which evolved into a personal mythology, constantly developing and expressed in an array of art images and materials.

 It is easy for description to take over in a drawing or painting—and I think that might be true in life too. I paint so that material facts, processes, and descriptive information can bounce back and forth to form an experience that is not just a collection of mostly well-behaved actions that, no matter how expressive, ultimately deliver specific content. Instead, I hope for a range of perceptual and psychological features that create experiences based on the way these characteristics vibrate with each other.

 My paintings are categorically narrative; however, they do not represent a specific idea or incident. I begin an often-lengthy preparatory process of building a composition with arbitrary choices and a focus on formal concerns. I choose the figures and their environment when all the elements cohere and develop an apparent pictorial logic.

 I began collecting documents and envelopes out of a need to investigate and report to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services about my entry into the country in order to qualify for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. They became the primary substrate of my practice, which includes painting, print, and collage. The precarious legality of existing between having or lacking a status permeates and informs my practice.

 I draw inspiration from the designs adorning classical Greek vases, with their intricate patterns and minimalist palette, which find support in the mathematical underpinnings governing their design. Proportional relationships and geometric configurations serve as the guiding principles, ensuring a harmonious interplay of surface and form. Recognizing the inherent power of these principles, I harness and expand on them.

 I am interested in providing some perspective on the aesthetics and politics that have risen out of the dot-com bubble and subsequent venture capitalist maneuverings of the late 2000s and 2010s. By appropriating the aesthetics of tech and internet finance, I hope to satirize the futurist and technocratic politics embedded within.

 My practice explores my connection to black women who go unseen and unheard. Understanding that our dichotomy is different. That we are hypervisible but still invisible. My work explores my identity as an individual as well as my identity in a wider community. It allows me to show versions of Black girl/womanhood through my gaze and own experiences. The images I paint allow me to show grace and celebration as well as frustration and confrontation. That even though sometimes our life experiences aren’t the same, we are still connected.

 My work is equal parts creation and destruction. The process begins from within, where I travel to far-reaching vulnerable places in my memories from childhood and life and examine them in three dimensions on canvas. The tedious physical act of building up my pieces with layers of collected materials, paint, and cardboard mimics the emotional work I simultaneously experience as I am creating. Each work is a discovery in which I hope to unearth personal truths that also speak to the heart of the Black experience.

 After more than a decade away, returning to the Midwest has injected my research with a renewed specificity. I source materials and inspiration from various historical locations in Indianapolis and my backyard. The repossessed house next to my studio, an abandoned playground on my property, and local businesses that have “gone under” in historically Black neighborhoods have become sites for my studio production which functions as a praxis of revision and reclamation.

 My work is anchored in the image-making process and invested in generating relationships with and between images. My work takes on a distinct spatiality as a point of departure to bring into focus sharp-edge geometric shapes, some representational, interplayed with color.