Aviva Rahmani Draws What We Inherit

Her drawings reject nostalgia. They function as records — of exile, ecology, memory, and what remains after the flood.

“In the midst of ecocide, art can divine hope out of a chaotic world. My task as an artist is to understand that and design another world.”

— Aviva Rahmani

Blued Tress Opera in rehearsal forperformance  at the Soapbox Galler 2024 y Gallery (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

That quote, shared in the context of her recent drawings, captures the essence of Aviva Rahmani’s newest body of work. These pieces are not commemorative, nor are they retrospective. They are urgent. They are acts of witnessing.

Blued Tress Opera installationl for "The Sea Will Have the Last Word," 2024 performance  at the Anita Rogers Gallery (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

For decades, Rahmani has treated art not as performance, but as presence; as a way of registering what the world is doing to us, and what we are doing to the world. Most people know her name through landmark ecological projects: Ghost Nets, in which she restored a damaged wetland in Maine; The Blued Trees Symphony, a legal-artistic strategy against pipeline development; or her ongoing collaborations with scientists and policy experts.

“Falling,” 1985 40"x72" oil on linen (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

But alongside those public interventions, Rahmani has also worked privately and persistently  on drawings and paintings. On canvas. On paper. On maps. On the fragile pages of books.

Now, as she is nearly 80, this practice has come into full focus, and never has it felt more necessary.

 

Drawing as Record, Not Illustration

Rahmani’s recent drawings are not about memory.

They are memory, personal, embodied, often coded. They do not attempt to clarify pain. They stay with it.

“Tolstoy & I 1-27-25” 10"x8" (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

The series Tolstoy & I exemplifies this approach. In it, Rahmani draws her own face onto the yellowing pages of her mother’s Cyrillic edition of War and Peace. These are not acts of critique or satire. They are insertions — personal, emotional, matrilineal. They represent her immigrant family’s flight from war in Eastern Europe over a century ago, and the ways in which women have always survived patriarchy: not through confrontation, but through what Rahmani calls “emotional work.”

"Tolstoy & I 2-23-25" 10"x8" (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

“These drawings,” she writes, “are about how women survive systems of power — by staying with what hurts.”

This isn’t political commentary rendered in visual form. It’s more intimate than that. Her face, appearing among Tolstoy’s text, marks not erasure but inclusion. A silent record in the margins of official history.

“Tolstoy & I 3-8-25” 10"x8" (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

These works also reflect what Rahmani calls her personal confrontation with “the violent traumas of today’s climate change and my own ecofeminism.” They are legacy drawings — but not in the tidy, institutional sense. They are records made during a time when even the idea of legacy feels fragile.

“Tolstoy & I 6-27-25” 10"x8" (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

The Sea Will Have the Last Word

Are We lost series (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

In the winter of 2024, a storm nearly destroyed Rahmani’s Maine studio. For an artist whose life’s work revolves around ecological systems and collapse, the event was both literal and symbolic.

Aviva working on the woodblock print “Are We Lost?”

She didn’t rebuild out of defiance.

She drew.

The works that emerged, The Sea Will Have the Last Word and Are We Lost?  are acts of processing, and of persistence. In Are We Lost?, human figures appear submerged, reaching for one another through waves. The images are drawn from two sources: Rahmani’s 1981wave dynamics studies at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and her ongoing research into Japanese wave iconography. One scientific, one cultural. One predictive, the other enduring.

Wave Scroll, 1981 – Scientific study of wave motion. One of the visual sources that inspired the series “Are We Lost? (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

“The iterated image of Are We Lost? is people reaching out to each other while being engulfed by waves,” she writes.

Woodblock print “Are We Lost?” 15"x25" (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

These drawings are not elegies. They are visual questions: Can we still reach each other? Can the “we” survive, even when the systems around us do not?

Woodblock print “Are We Lost?” 15"x25" (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

Painting at the Edge: Ecotones and Emotional Systems

Rahmani’s recent drawings are not a departure from her painting practice ; they are its concentration.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, she produced large-scale oil works such as California Flowers (1988), Breaking Waves (1998), Arms Around the Marsh, and Spring Fog. These paintings focused on ecotones, transitional zones where land meets water, where change is visible and constant. They are not romantic landscapes. They are tensions rendered in color.

"California Flowers" oil on linen 96"x120" 1988 (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

From her studio on Vinalhaven Island, across from Narrows Island, Rahmani observed tidal changes daily. Over time, she developed a distinct palette: deep marine blues, muted fog tones, earth greys and greens, all grounded in lived observation. Her brushwork moved between rigor and surrender, often producing what she called “impetuous and disorderly” marks. Particularly in shoreline scenes, her strokes reflect instability, emotional charge, and porousness.

In her work, the edge is always the subject: the edge of territory, the edge of identity, the edge of collapse.

Today, her drawings continue this focus. They are smaller in scale, but no less expansive in meaning. As she writes in her statement, the decision to work on paper reflects an “intense focus on details, fulcrums which unwittingly force changes.” The modest format heightens their urgency.

Legacy Without Nostalgia

Rahmani describes these new works as “legacy drawings,” but not in the celebratory sense. They are not a summary of past accomplishments. They are a reckoning, with systems, histories, and futures still in flux.

"Breaking Waves" oil on linen 76"x86" 1998 (Credit www.avivarahmani.com)

“I’ve spent my life trying to understand what systems do to people — and what people do to systems,” she told me.

“Now I’m trying to say it plainly. Before it’s too late.”

The drawings are deceptively small. Some are the size of a journal page. But their emotional scale is vast. They ask us not only to look — but to stay. To register what is being passed down. And to question what we will do with it.

They ask:

What do we inherit?

And what are we still willing to carry?

Where to See Her Latest Works

If you care about contemporary art that confronts memory, gender, ecology, and collective trauma without spectacle, Aviva Rahmani’s recent drawings are essential.

They don’t perform.

They hold.

They endure.

Her latest pieces, including works from Tolstoy & I, Are We Lost, are represented by the Anita Rogers Gallery in New York, which has become a critical steward of her evolving practice.

Inquiries about viewing the work can be made directly at anitarogersgallery.com

But more importantly: see the work in person, if you can.

Because this isn’t art that ends with the frame.

It’s art that remembers.

And asks you to remember with it.

From "Tolstoy & I" series