Rossitza “Rossi” Todorova is the 2022-23 Reno City Artist, the third person to hold the distinction, established to promote our community’s visual artists and to increase the public’s engagement with local art.
The Professor of Art at Truckee Meadows Community College (TMCC) creates in a variety of mediums and materials including painting, drawing, sculpture, print-making, book-arts, video, and on-site installations.
An immigrant from Sofia, Bulgaria, who moved to Reno at the age of 10, Todorova inspires others thanks to a work ethic that found her simultaneously creating new art, working at a museum, and taking on the responsibilities of running a non-profit from the age of 16.
Todorova’s work touches on diverse themes: time and space, fertility and the body, and loss and longing, yet one of the threads woven through her art is a sense of motion, and a deep connection to the adopted desert landscape she has called home for decades.
The immigrant experience has been formative in her work since she began school in the U.S. She arrived in Reno with her mother and older sister in 1991 to meet up with her father who’d already been working at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he’d been recruited to run a pharmacology lab. (Both of her parents had earned dual doctorates – M.D. and Ph.D. degrees – in Bulgaria).
Her home country was going through radical change – there were free elections happening in the Soviet Bloc country and Todorova and her sister had been instructed not to speak about the elections, or much else, outside of their home. The impoverished Communist country still had breadlines, and her grandfather stood in line for two weeks –receiving a number at the end of every day to return to his place in line the next morning – to get winter boots for the family.
Rossi Todorova is seen in one of the ribbon-covered mirrors she uses to paint her unique landscapes
When she started fourth grade in Reno, Todorova spoke no more than five words of English. “I had to cry to make them stop speaking to me in Spanish,” she said, explaining that one of the other students had been assigned to translate into Spanish for her “because Bulgaria has to be in South America.” Immersed in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program at Agnes Risley Elementary School, it took her six months to start understanding her new language, and a year to become fluent. She says she kept a thick accent until high school.
It was fortunate that Todorova started at Risley Elementary: not only was there an ESL program, but a drawing instructor for gifted-and-talented students visited the school regularly, and she was chosen to be part of the program. “We visited the Nevada Museum of Art, we did workshops at Sierra Arts, and I learned lots of things that I still teach today.”
Todorova combined those connections with her immigrant work ethic. In Communist Bulgaria, her grandparents and parents all worked. She says she’s still shocked that her female friends in the U.S. don’t have a model of how to raise children and work at the same time, because they’ve never seen it, and they don’t have the multigenerational households that can make it possible.
Before Todorova immigrated to the U.S. with her mother and sister, the three of them spent a short time in Paris where she visited the Louvre and knew then that she wanted her artwork to be shown there one day. She was disappointed to later find out that they don’t display contemporary art. In the museums in Bulgaria and Paris, “everyone that worked there was old,” said Todorova. She was amazed at how young people were allowed to work in the U.S., and after seeing the young girls behind the counter at the Nevada Museum of Art, she decided that she too wanted to work in a museum.
By the time she was 16, not only was Todorova employed at the Nevada Museum of Art, but she was planning and painting murals with a non-profit called Youth ArtWorks. After two years of working her way up through the program, she became an assistant to the director, and after her boss resigned, took over an organization with 70 employees and seven simultaneous public art projects.
Todorova was given no formal training, and was instead told, “your files are downstairs in the basement.” She continued working as a non-profit director, and as a museum security guard, while pursuing a double major at the University of Nevada, Reno – a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a business degree.
Because of her full work and class schedule, she graduated in the fall, which meant that a lot of things built into the bachelor’s program – including available gallery space for a show of her work – were not available. She approached the Nevada Museum of Art to see if she could show her work there, and as luck would have it, they had a two-week window of availability in the gallery in front of the theater. She showed three large pieces there, and the museum took one of them into their collection. It wasn’t the Louvre, but the most significant museum in her adopted home state acquired her work for its permanent collection right after she graduated college. Between her undergraduate and graduate school (Todorova earned her Master of Fine Arts at Arizona State University in 2013) she continued to build her portfolio, and supported countless other artists working for the Nevada Arts Council and The Children’s Museum of Phoenix.
While in her three-year master’s program in painting and drawing, Todorova was introduced to classroom teaching. She said the first students a teacher has in a class “are the best students you almost ever get…that’s how you get hooked.” As an extrovert, Todorova drew energy from her students and was inspired by the fact “they’re making this amazing artwork.” She has been teaching full time at TMCC since 2018.
Todorova’s artwork transcends many different mediums and materials, but there are clear connections between her drawings, paintings, videos, installations, sculptures, and book-making pieces. Place is a common theme across her use of materials and periods. She has long been intrigued with landscapes and the way that people move across them, shape them, and are changed by them. There were two distinct phases of her life where she commuted daily – one while working in Carson City and commuting from the Truckee Meadows (this before the Interstate 580 extension was completed through Carson Valley) and the other from Glendale to Tempe, Arizona while she was in graduate school.
Todorova explained what she was trying to convey in her artwork of the time. “Imagine your drive and the path from your front door, until you got here today – if you were to compress that, what would it look like?” This abstract art was further informed by the highways and concrete grids of Arizona’s desert metropolis where she tried to capture the juxtaposition of looking at seemingly still objects on the horizon while traveling 70-miles-an-hour. She began to play with lattice-like structural compositions that she described as “like a still life, inspired by the built environment.”
The natural landscapes of the Great Basin began to dominate Todorova’s work upon her post-graduate return to the Truckee Meadows. The grid lines of the Arizona-inspired work softened into ribbons, and the abstract landscapes became more recognizable as playas and lakeshores. One of her techniques is to place small mirrors in the landscape with mylar or metallic ribbons affixed upon their surfaces, and then paint the reflected place and the metallic ribbon as it picks up light, color, and shadow. It takes careful consideration to realize that the landscapes themselves were behind Todorova when she painted, reflected back to her in the mirror. The immigrant who still deeply feels the pain of a second, hypothetical other is able to paint realistic looking images that impossibly look in opposite directions – certain aspects and elements of the landscape obscured by the delicate ribbons that are in turn affected by even the smallest breeze as she paints.
Another of her mirror-pieces “I asked, and the world opened” (2019), is an hour-long video shot looking east across the Truckee Meadows as the lights of Reno flicker in the distance. As the foreground darkens, the round mirror picks up the light from the west, moon-like, reflecting back toward the camera. The metaphor of light and dark, memory and place, past and present, is striking, and reflects the longing inherent in her work: for her now-deceased father, for a country she used to call home, and for a sense of what was, and what might have been.
“It’s like a chalice that just won’t let go the passing of time,” said Todorova. “It’s just containing this memory, this moment, and it can’t let it go.”