Learning to Fly with Ester Petukhova
Ester Petukhova. Photo courtesy of Oliver Flynn.
Ester Petukhova is a self-described “post-Soviet artist,” working between nodes of research and painting, constructing a practice rooted in the notion of displaced nostalgia. Born in Vologda, Russia, Petukhova and her family fled to Portland, Oregon, when she was a year old. Last year, Ester received a Scholastic Microgrant to publish her second book, Little Odessa, A Brighton Beach Anthology, collecting photo documentation, essays, and paper ephemera from Brighton Beach. In light of the book’s recent completion, I spoke with the artist on accessing Brighton Beach, the confines of image-making, and flight as a fellow first-generation American who misses a home I never got to see.
If and When You Find Me, 2023. Printed by Conveyor Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
Victoria Reshetnikov: A book is a very definitive way to signal a project ending, and Little Odessa is now your second publication. How have you seen your research across your books evolve?
Ester Petukhova: If and When You Find Me, my first book, was more of a larger cultural amalgamation of physical representations of post-Soviet culture: things like uncanny social media posts and scanned candy wrappers. Since the project was digitally focused, the things I collected existed disparately and asynchronously from one another, so there wasn’t as clear of a way to situate their narrative histories.
Therefore, when I was imagining the shape of Little Odessa in relation to If and When You Find Me, it felt especially important for the second project to be site-specific. Though Little Odessa was also focused on post-Soviet identity, I was more interested in situating my work in the political and social discourse of that neighborhood.
When I started working on the project, the first thing I did was try to find materials and artifacts that I could cite from existing library collections. But, I found that these archives only held a “private” history of affluent families from the area. There was a significant absence of documentation of the immigrants and diaspora in that neighborhood. So it also felt important for me to use Little Odessa to start filling this gap.
VR: How receptive were people in the neighborhood to your project?
EP: When I would embark to conduct interviews in Brighton Beach, I’d try to approach people in the most neutral way possible. I realized you have to enter in a very disarmed way, because Brightoners—especially older ones—hold a suspicion that’s followed them from their Soviet upbringings.
For example, I was talking to the head manager of the restaurant Tatiana’s. After some general questions, I eventually asked her about the changes she’s seen in the neighborhood. It was clear she felt really let down by the lack of care for the infrastructure in Brighton; the boardwalk was falling apart and housing was becoming really expensive. But at that moment when I started probing for her specific opinions, I saw something shift and she suddenly said “by the way, I don't want my name to be on record.” Her reaction resembled the fear or suspicion that a lot of our post-Soviet relatives feel when discussing cultural development or local legislation. It’s not that they can’t attest to the history; it was that they want to be able to remove themselves from it at any moment.
I also remember looking at an apartment building and this elderly gentleman came up to me and started up a conversation with me about the architecture. At some point, though, he pivoted and asked me if I’m Jewish, to which I replied not entirely. He then said, “Правда ли, что евреи говорят букву ‘р’ очень странно?” Don’t Jews say their R’s very strangely? That sudden fear of otherness really caught me off guard, too.
The act of representing a cultural identity or political perspective felt like such a high stake in the conversations I had. I kept hearing, “I want to be neutral, I just want to go about my day.” And that's understandable, but it’s also a continuation of a Soviet-era regime of information control that’s now being performed in the US. Because that’s what the USSR was like: you didn’t want to have excessive attention diverted towards you in any way, especially if you were someone who was othered in that political environment. Blending into the background was not just preferred; it was necessary to be able to survive.
Little Odessa, A Brighton Beach Anthology, 2025. Printed and bound by Conveyor Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
VR: As a post-Soviet American, how did this research make you negotiate your own identity?
EP: At the end of the day, I’m not from Brighton Beach. I’m just an artist looking in and trying to understand because it’s a place I feel connected to. I knew that there would be resistance, and in the end I don’t feel I was able to crack down on Brighton because of the othering. There were of course people more willing to talk, but with others it felt that there was no world in which they would. I ultimately decided not to include any of the written interviews I had with community members in Little Odessa—it didn’t feel appropriate to transcribe them.
VR: It’s also notable that you’re coming from a very different Russian-language community in Portland. How did that experience shape this project?
EP: When I actually started to spend more time in Brighton I realized that the two Russian-language communities act as foils for one another. Brighton’s has a much more liberalized, or even agnostic understanding of culture, while Portland’s is deeply religious. The celebration of art, history, and sciences amongst Russian-language communities here really struck me. I'm sure that you have parents who have read all the classics.
Excerpt from Little Odessa, A Brighton Beach Anthology, 2025. Printed and bound by Conveyor Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
VR: That’s pretty accurate. I grew up not practicing Judaism, but I always felt an emphasis on culture—my grandparents would take my sister and I to watch recordings of ballet from the Bolshoi Theatre at a local theater in Forest Hills, for example.
EP: It’s interesting that you say that because the first time I went to an art museum was when I was 15. And I wonder if the reason why is because culture was so often associated with the Soviet regime—the symphony and ballet were an integral part of the USSR. So in Portland, this high creative power became kind of sacrilegious.
VR: That makes me think, then, that the emphasis on cultural literacy in Northeastern Russian-language communities is actually deeply related to the suspicion you encountered in Brighton Beach. Both are a kind of subconscious preservation of Soviet thinking.
EP: Absolutely. A lot of the religious communities I come from are very traditional. I would say two thirds of the post-Soviet immigrants that I grew up with now have started to build families, and those that haven’t embraced this “expected” path—whether they’re queer, or pursuing higher education, or becoming artists—were effectively othered from the community. When I think back on it, that experience definitely informed how I navigated conversations in Brighton Beach, because I’ve already encountered this closed mentality growing up.
Excerpt from Little Odessa, A Brighton Beach Anthology, 2025. Printed and bound by Conveyor Studio. Courtesy of the artist.
VR: You have two distinct nodes of your practice: the intense, image-based research, and your painting practice. How would you say Little Odessa has informed the rest of your work?
EP: For me, bookmaking acts as an image-making procedure, so I don’t necessarily feel like I need to insert art in between the things I collect. When I was working on Little Odessa, it was more about documenting and staging my collection. When I’m sifting through material, I always think of them as physical records, but the ephemera I collect function almost as footnotes for my painting. Sometimes the research is directly translated, but often it’s more like a narrative or spatial reference. The importance of featuring that physical thing varies, but I’m almost always looking at a configuration of things, assembling and seeing what kind of relationships emerge.
Sometimes those images don’t even show up directly in my work. Like in A Silent Strike [2024], for example. It’s based on a game I played with my grandmother, where me and my cousins, the “swan-geese,” would all line up on one side of a field and there would be one “wolf,” my grandmother, who stood between us and the home base on the other side of the field. We’d have to run across to the other side of the field without being caught by her.
Through this game, I became really interested in that moment when we decided to make the flight. When do you make that migration? From this, images of swans became especially pertinent for me as a narrative tool. There’s a particular breed of swans in Eastern Europe that only migrate if they’re taught to by their parents. If they aren’t, they never learn, and just assimilate to the environment they were born into. That felt deeply poetic to me—despite the cultural artifacts or records we can access as post-Soviet individuals, we ourselves cannot go back to where we flew from. It also felt especially salient after my dear friend and first love passed away: to grieve what you cannot return to. So this loss and my migration became deeply connected.
In producing my work and unfurling the iconography I collect, I try to crack away at what these images and places can mean for someone else in the future. That’s ultimately the way that I operate: to reflect, interrogate and transform this nostalgic aesthetic, such that maybe not now, but someday, these images can come to represent something else for someone else, and not perpetuate the same kind of violence they once did.
A Silent Strike, 2024. Acrylic on paper. Courtesy of the artist.
Little Odessa, A Brighton Beach Anthology is available for viewing at the Center for Brooklyn History, the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Historical, and the Library of Congress.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
