OUR ARTISTS
Sarma Taylor
Sarma Taylor is the daughter of a native Latvian woman, Zenta Taylor, whose family excaped the ravages of World War Two as refugees and eventually settled in the New York City area. Raised to fluently speak the Latvian language and appreciate the special Latvian culture, Sarma went on to earn her bachelor's degree from Boston University and her master's degree in Art History from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. Being a talented artist and creative jewelry and metal artist, Sarma has developed her own line of custom-made gold and silver jewelry. she has painted numerous engaging American landscapes, still lifes and portraits in oil. By day a valued and well-respected business advisor, CFO and consultant, Sarma values her family's love of Latvia and the many fine artists that flourish there.
Other Latvian Artists and their available works.
Herberts Mangolds
Ink/watercolor
Herberts Mangolds (1901-1978) graduated from the Latvian National Academy of Art grafikas meistardarbnica(graphics department) in 1933. During the 1930s, parallel to his participation in the Latvian military, he worked both as a graphic artist and painter of porcelain at the highly respected Riga porcelain factory. Precisely because of his military career as a major with the Latvian battalions that led to the independence of Latvia, Mangolds was included among the many thousands of Latvians shipped out in June of 1941 to labor camps in Siberia. He was condemned to death in Norilsk, Siberia. Surprisingly, Mangolds’ personal plea to the upper court of the Communist Party of Soviet Union resulted in a reduction of his sentence to 10 years. However, meeting a fate similar to many long-term prisoners, he was not released in 1951 as planned. Instead, the artist was integrated into a local Norilsk administrative position. The city of Norilsk was located above the Arctic Circle, 1800 miles from Moscow. Soviets encouraged the permanent transfer of various nationalities around the Union, with the express intent to dilute cultures and languages. Many Latvians ended up staying permanently in Siberia, and small Latvian communities exist there today. Conflicting information about the artist Mangolds makes it difficult to determine when he actually returned to Latvia. Ilze Konstante’s research documented in Stalin’s Long Shadow, indicates that he returned home in 1959, and that at that point he was “rehabilitated;” however, a large collection of his watercolors from the 1950s and 1960s suggest that his return may have been much later. These works show Siberian and Asian landscapes that date all the way up to 1969. Much of Mangold’s oeuvre was saved from the Soviet authorities by his friends who had emigrated to Brazil after World War Two.