Printer Friendly Version - Kassandra Semenov-Leiva: Artfully Telling a Story

Kassandra Semenov-Leiva’s Cuban-inspired artwork “mitos y raices,” myths and roots, will be on display at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek. An opening reception is on June 25. Photo by Rita Christopher/The Courier

Kassandra Semenov-Leiva left Cuba, where she was born, when she was 2 ½ years old. Still, Cuba has a deep influence on her art. She does not paint direct representations of the island. Rather, her depictions are her own impressions of a place that has been very much part of her life but, nonetheless, remains, as she writes, “distant and ephemeral.”

The paintings are part of her current show at Congregation Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester. The opening reception of the show, to which the public is invited, is June 25, at 3 p.m.

Kassandra calls the Cuban-inspired artwork “Mitos y Raices,” or “Myths and Roots” in translation. “I am more American than Cuban,” she says. “I mythologize what Cuba has meant to me.”

Her paintings give visual presence to the blend of African and Hispanic influences that mark Cuban culture. “Afro-Cuban makes Cuba what it is, in food, in dance, in art,” she says.

But she wanted her painting also to incorporate the distinctive natural background of the island. “I wanted to be closer to Cuban nature. You can’t separate the people from it,” she says. Included in her art are renditions of a bird found only in Cuba, the red, white, and blue tocororo or Cuban trogon.

The show also features a series based on the days of the week as inspired by the biblical story of creation in Genesis. Kassandra says that ever since she learned the days of the week, she has pictured a different symbol for each day in her mind. Now she has put those symbols into her paintings.

Still, she says the symbols are for each viewer to interpret in their own way. “I didn’t want to paint anything obvious,” she explains. “I hope people read the descriptions and find meaning. Every single person has their own experience and that experience colors what they see.”

Kassandra has turned the second bedroom in the apartment she shares with her husband, Mischa, into her studio.

Both Kassandra and Mischa share the apartment with Daphne, a bichon-poodle mix that Kassandra has had since 2019. For her artwork, Kassandra uses her maiden name and her middle name, Kassandra Moriah Leiva, or KML as she signs her paintings.

Kassandra and Mischa, both of whom now work at Centerbrook Architects, met when both were undergraduates studying architecture at Princeton. Kassandra’s mother had suggested architecture when she knew how interested her daughter was in art.

‘I guess she suggested architecture because she didn’t want me to be a starving artist,” Kassandra says.

Kassandra and her mother arrived in the United States together in 1995. Her father had left Cuba some three years earlier while her mother was pregnant. He came on a raft, “and he couldn’t swim,” Kassandra adds. The rafters were picked up in the Florida Straits by the U.S. Navy.

Kassandra and her mother left Cuba clandestinely and received asylum in the U.S.

Kassandra grew up speaking Spanish at home and English at school. “I am surprised I have no accent,” she says. “People cannot tell.”

The family lived first in Miami and then, when Kassandra was 11, moved to North Carolina, first to the small town of Mooresville and then to Charlotte.

Entering high school, Kassandra won a full scholarship to a local private school. It came as a result of the high scores she had gotten on a standardized examination usually taken in high school but suggested for her as an eighth grader. She also won a full scholarship to Princeton.

After Princeton, both Kassandra and Mischa earned a master’s degree at the Yale School of Architecture. While Yale students, the pair won a design competition sponsored by a sustainable transportation coalition called goNewHavengo in which they converted two spaces in the Fair Haven area from parking to a park. They called their design an urban parklet, complete with tables, a bike rack, and tree shade created by metal canopies sprouting from wooden tree trunks.

The parklet was built, using the money Kassandra and Mischa had won as a prize, along with other funds they helped raise.

“People in the neighborhood loved it,” she says. “They cleaned it, swept it.”

The parklet, however, was removed because of a complaint about drug use in the space. Still, she says there was only a single instance she knew of involving drugs. Kassandra believes the parklet is now sitting somewhere in storage.

Kassandra and Misha will be teaching a course at the Yale School of Architecture this fall on architectural ornamentation, a course both took during their own degree work. They have already taught the course at the University of Hartford. Ornamentation, Kassandra explains, is about repeated patterns and the stories those patterns tell. She sees it as another expression of the storytelling that is a part of her paintings.

According to Kassandra, teaching together works smoothly. “We kind of tag team,” she says.

The upcoming exhibit is not Kassandra’s first. Her works have been shown at galleries in Middletown, New Britain, and at the Art Space in Chester. At a solo exhibit at her college in Princeton, one of her paintings disappeared off the wall but was returned by mail some months later, carefully wrapped.

She is eager to hear from viewers at the opening reception of her show at Congregation Beth Shalom on June 25.

“I am looking forward to getting people’s reactions, what they have to say about the paintings,” she says.