From a Kyiv Classroom to a Local Basement Studio

For more than three decades, hundreds of objects d’art sat quietly in a basement, a private universe that developed one canvas and one sculpture at a time by a woman with no art degree, no formal training, and, by her own account, no plan to be referred to as “an artist.”

Today, 500 of those works are displayed in a gallery inside MedSide Adult Day Health Center, the result of a whirlwind two-month collaboration that began with a home visit. Nothing if not prolific, Sasha (Alexandra) Khodorkovsky’s rows and shelves of work consist of glass, metal, wood, artistic plates, mixed media pieces, and acrylics.

The gallery’s origin story sounds more like serendipity than strategy. In May, Julia Korabelnikova, director of MedSide Adult Day Health Center, visited Khodorkovsky’s home and took the basement stairs to where the collection had been stored for years. Korabelnikova had an “aha moment” recognizing the potential. The next day, she began transforming the pieces and displays with design layouts and marketing for a future event reveal. For two months, the two women worked side by side to build what bloomed into a full-fledged public exhibition space.

Two years earlier, the MedSide CEO offered the space for this first official exhibition. That early show represented only a fraction of what visitors see today. The current collection was not donated to the health center. It was sold in its entirety to a single anonymous buyer. For now, the works remain on view at MedSide for the public to enjoy while a more permanent, higher-visibility home is found.

Khodorkovsky was born and raised in Kyiv, Ukraine, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1990. Her path to painting wasn’t conventional. She holds an education degree in Russian language and literature, from what she described as her “previous life.” After arriving in America, she trained as an esthetician, spending years working in spas. With no formal art education, creating became her self-invention and private expression that developed over time.

Khodorkovsky describes her style as “a fusion of Art Deco elegance and mass-media imagery, rendered primarily in acrylics alongside other materials chosen for how they interact with my method.” Her palette leans away from loud and saturated as she takes inspiration from the natural world tones: blues and sky blues, greens, yellows, reds, and grays, even though nature itself isn’t really her muse.

What does drive her is the “object in front of her.” When something catches her eye, her instinct is to imagine how it could be reshaped by “magical” techniques. Larger more complex works begin with preliminary sketches and planning. Smaller pieces come together in an hour, while others can take days or weeks.

Khodorkovsky’s own home walls hold pieces by Leonid Khodorkovsky (her husband’s brother) alongside work by acclaimed Israeli artists, Leonid Balaklav, Boris Karafelov, and Russian artist Vasya Lozhkin. Her deepest artistic “driver” is the French artist and designer, Erté, the early 20th-century master of Art Deco illustration and fashion design. Sasha calls him her “primary inspiration, the artist who helped set me on my creative path.” She began by copying his celebrated works, and those early studies remain among the pieces of which she is most proud.

Long before MedSide became the exhibition’s home base, Khodorkovsky built a following the old-fashioned way, booth by booth, festival by festival. She sold and displayed work at Piedmont Park, Inman Park, and Chastain Park festivals, the AJT’s Jewish Life Festival, and Chanukah bazaars.

With interest in her work growing, Khodorkovsky and Korabelnikova are developing a formal catalog listing available works and prices as a step toward making the work accessible to buyers beyond those who amble through MedSide’s doors. Khodorkovsky’s story is about detours, imagination and good ole hard work.

She concluded, “There are some pieces that I would never sell because they took so much time and effort. To me, they are priceless.”