TORONTO – Artist Sophia Lada, known for her artwork rooted in folklore and mythology, died in Toronto on February 14 after a three-year battle with cancer.
She was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1941 and, after her family’s obligatory stay in a refugee camp in Germany (in Augsburg and Regensburg), they immigrated to Philadelphia in 1949. In 1980 she moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, to take up a curatorial position at the Oseredok Art Gallery and Museum.
Most recently, Lada, as she preferred to be called, took part in the exhibit “The Ukrainian Diaspora: Women Artists 1908-2015” at The Ukrainian Museum in New York, which was held from October 18, 2015, to February 14. The exhibit, which “examined the relationship between Ukrainian identity and women artists beyond the borders of Ukraine,” featured 100 works by 44 artists, the majority of whom belong to the post-World War II wave of immigration to North America. The exhibit ended on the day of Lada’s death.
A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Lada also completed a two-year design program at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. Her works are found in collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. She worked on many commissions, and took part in various solo and curated group shows.
Lada explored several media of art. In a series of early paintings, she analyzed images of the female form. Her primary inspiration for this group was the publication “The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe” (University of California Press, 1982) by Marija Gimbutas. Her 1992 body of work, “Reflections,” was created as a traveling exhibit and shown at the St. Vladimir Gallery in Toronto, Multicultural Gallery at Central Michigan University and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago. It was an ongoing series of visual commentaries in which she continued exploring images of the female form.
Her subsequent series, “Lunar Visions,” used a consistent backdrop of 12 gouaches that were treated with a similar watery blue wash inspired by the light of the Canadian prairie night sky.
Another medium was the iconography. Lada was asked by the Sisters of St. Basil the Great in Rome to decorate the chapel of their Motherhouse. The Sisters wanted the icons to observe the canons of Byzantine ecclesiastical art. Here was a chance for Lada to use what she had learned from the iconographer Sviatoslav Hordynsky when she worked with him in the 1970s in New York on several church projects for Munich and western Canada.
Working on the project for the Basilian Sisters, she painted the panels of the saints in Toronto and went to Rome in the spring of 1998 for the installation of the 21 six-foot figures. “This was the most challenging part of the project and the biggest one that I have worked on independently,” Lada explained. “Doing iconography takes a specific frame of mind.”
Lada then became interested in the use of textiles in her art. This was nurtured through her contact with the Textile Museum of Canada, where she took part in a group show with her work “Shadow Box.” The “Found Threads” exhibit was shown in 2007 in the *new* gallery in Toronto and during the Ukrainian Embroidery Conference at the Ukrainian Educational and Cultural Center in Jenkintown, Pa. Reclaimed vintage linens, all hand-embroidered by her mother, in whose existing geometrical borders Lada hand stitched multiple images with threads found in her mother’s sewing rooms.
In 2005 Lada, together with her then 98-year-old mother, Marusia Lada-Uhorczak, collaborated in embroidering a 32 by 78-inch rushnyk that was later used in her mother’s burial.
“My aim is not to recreate cult images of the past but rather to create visual imagery of an inner reality that is felt and can be shared only through art. I want to compel the viewer to experience a spiritual feeling about the need of unifying human form with nature and thereby to recharge their own connection to the community and cosmos,” Lada stated.
Lada leaves her son, Mir, daughter-in-law, Leda, and granddaughter, Aurora. Her son is organizing a retrospective exhibit of the artist’s work to honor her last wishes.
More information about Sophia Lada and images of her works can be found at www.sophialada.com.