Notes for: Zolita Sue Zlota Zehave SVERDLOVE

First lived with parents and mother's sister & brother Helen & Harry ROTHMAN
in Washington Heights, Bronx 167th Street. This was after her mother's mother
Zlota died and the father was probably off on a drinking binge. The home
broke up. When Lita was born she was named for maternal grandmother, Zlate.
(English pronounciation Zl-ah-ta) Her crib was the bottom drawer of a dresser.

After Lee & Harry attended the lecture by Dr. (Murray?) Port on The Rhythm
Method for Birth Control, Lee got pregnant with Andrew! (Me!) During 1939 they
found a house being build in Mount Vernon while Harry was doing electrical
work in Pelham and Mt. Vernon for the firm he started with Carl G. Johnson.
C.G. Electric. Later C.G. Johnson Electric, finally Johnson Electrical
Corporation.

After Lita married, they moved to Princeton. Then Los Angeles.
Don continued his PhD. in U Cal Berkley.
They lived at 675 Upland Road, Redwood city.
They moved east to Pine Brook Blvd., New Rochelle, while Don was a professor
at Brooklyn Polytechnic. Melissa was born while they lived there.
Then they moved to Dallas, Texas.
ADDR:1445 Indiana Ave., So. Pasadena, CA 91030 TEL:213-257-7217 or 254-3389

Lita is an artist. She paints under her maiden name Zolita Sverdlove and her
exhibitions include County of Los Angeles, CENTURY GALLERY, Officiated by the
L.A. Mission College at 13000 Sayre Street, Sylmar, CA. She was part of a 5
person exhibition April 17 to May 3, 1994. Her painting of a bridge was in
the newspaper artical about that exhibit.

If you're in the Los Angeles area , call her to get on her mailing list.

Who's Who American Women 1989-1990 16th Edition
SVERDLOVE, ZOLITA, artist, printmaker; b. N.Y.C. Feb. 21, 1936; d. Harry and
Leah (Rothman) S.; m. Donald Rapp, May 30, 1956; children: Melissa Rapp, Erica
Rapp. Cert. Cooper Union Coll., N.Y.C., 1956, BFA, 1977. Chmn. fine arts com.
U.Tex.,Dallas, 1972-73, exhibits dir., 1973-74; free-lance artist. Prints
reproduced in Mondus Artium, 1976; exhibited in group shows: U. Texas,
1973-74, Dallas Fine Arts (first prize), 1975, Purdue U. (first prize), 1970,
Marymount Coll. (hon.mention), 1969. Nat. Endowment Arts grantee, 1973-74.
Mem. Los Angeles Printmaking Soc. (bd. dirs. 1981-83, chmn. new mems., 1983),
Graphic Arts Council Los Angeles County Mus., Women's Caucus for Arts, Phila.
Print Club. Home and Office: 1445 Indiana Ave South Pasadena CA 91030
LAST: 22-Oct-1994
Found her baby announcement. February 21, 1936 4:23 A.M. and a post card to
her parents apartment, 602 West 165th Street, Manhattan (1936-1939)

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Ms. Sverdlove received her B.F.A. from the Cooper Union Art School. She also studied with Richard Diebenkorn at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Her landscape, seascape and other paintings are in numerous collections, both private and public. Among the institutions that own her work are: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Owens-Corning Collection of the Toledo, Ohio Museum, Purdue University, Marymount College, New York, Saban Entertainment (LA), Lomas and Nettleson (Dallas), Grand Hotel (Houston), Holiday Inn (Corpus Christi), and City Of Hope (Duarte, CA).

Her landscape, seascape and other paintings has been shown in numerous venues, including the Allan Stone Gallery (New York), the Cooper Union (New York), Hooks-Epstein Gallery (Houston), Longview Museum (Texas), Valley House Gallery (Dallas), Brand Library (Main Gallery in Glendale), Orlando Gallery (Los Angeles), the Maturango Museum, and the University of Judaism.
Many of her art works over the past decade are oil paintings, watercolors and graphics of California landscapes, particularly of the San Gabriel Valley, the Pasadena area looking northward to the San Gabriel mountains and southward to the buildings of downtown Los Angeles in the distance. Other paintings represent the California coast from Orange County to Monterey.
Josef Woodward's review in the Los Angeles Times:

"Drawing on a subtle and rough-hewn painterly gift, Sverdlove shows landscape paintings of the great outdoors in our veritable backyard, although we may not immediately recognize the scenes.

Her landscapes are just impressionistic enough to throw off the scent of familiarity, and she displays a romantic's sense of transference, finding allusions to other places. Thus, she views "New Mexico Clouds Over L. A." and an uncharacteristic purple haze in "Winter Skies Over Santa Barbara."

Color plays a central role in her vision, as with the outburst of yellows and oranges in "Sea of Flowers," consuming the lower half of the canvas. This subject could have been gaudy in the wrong hands, but Sverdlove's grace and balance save the day. These are paintings about nature as well as about the pure inner life of painting.”
Statement by the artist about her work: Time in Flux
Nature provides us forms in flux. Clouds, water, waves and weather are in continual turmoil in the California landscape and coastal seascape, moving and churning through sequences of varying aspects. Their moods can vary from tranquil to ominous. My art is concerned with these changing moods of our surroundings, not only to capture the moments of individual moods, but also to convey the movement from one landscape environment to another. I have been exploring the dynamics of unstructured forms, such as clouds and water in landscapes and seascapes. My subjects are chameleons. They assume different guises at different times of day or different weather conditions. My clouds dramatize the landscape by giving it a dynamic character. At a deeper level, they speak of a force behind nature that is metaphysical. They speak of the mystery of creation.