Sasha Chavchavadze approaches her family history with some ambivalence. At times she tries to stash it away. “All this heavy Russian history becomes too big,” she says. Still, she often turns to it as source material for her multimedia artwork. To create a recent digital print, she went back to it again, though not to that Russian past, but rather to a chapter from her grandfather’s life that included an enigmatic relationship with Richmond Barthé, a well-known African American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Chavchavadze’s grandfather, Paul, was a writer, and her grandmother, Nina, was a painter. Their social circles included accomplished and eccentric creative types, including many of the Outer Cape’s early 20th-century “bohemians.” Her grandparents were also members of the Georgian and Russian royal families. They grew up in palaces in St. Petersburg and escaped with not much more than their lives before the Russian Revolution (their fathers were both executed by the Bolsheviks). They eked out a modest life in the woods of South Wellfleet, where they lived in a former sea captain’s house abutting the marsh.

“I remember them as two old people living in this house, but there was also this other world. You’d see it in shards and closets,” says Chavchavadze, sitting in the kitchen of the house that her grandparents purchased in 1939 by selling a brooch given to them as a wedding present by Nina’s grandmother, Queen Olga of Greece.

Above the kitchen table hang a few of Chavchavadze’s paintings and drawings. The imagery in these works is developed from her grandparents’ things found around the house over the years. Silverware, broken shells, and fragments of text coalesce into dense images. “My artwork is about piecing together things that are fragmented,” says Chavchavadze. A broken teacup is a recurring motif. “On many different levels it goes back to the Revolution,” she says, adding that “it has multiple meanings for me: starting over, starting things in a new way, starting something new from something destroyed.”

In her collage-like 2011 book, Museum of Matches, Chavchavadze recounts family history alongside images of her artwork, letters, historical documents, photographs, and personal reflections. There’s plenty of family intrigue: her grandparents’ friendship with Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, who defected to the U.S. in 1978 and who would visit them in Wellfleet; her father’s secretive career as a Russian-speaking CIA agent; her mother’s relationship with JFK, whom Chavchavadze says she once found hiding behind the refrigerator of her family’s Washington, D.C apartment.

Whether working with words or images, Chavchavadze is masterful at presenting hints of a narrative without ever giving the full picture. “Finding clues is the thing that gets me going to make a painting,” she says. “I’m following threads of stories but not necessarily finding resolution.” In Useful Objects #8, each object — a broken cord, a vintage travel guide, a spool of thread — is drawn with careful attention to its surface, shape, and personality. The elements are each fully articulated, but the connection among them is not.

Chavchavadze’s playful approach to history can serve different aims. It’s a gesture of reclamation in a series about women forgotten by history, which includes Margaret Fuller, the 19th-century editor and writer whom Chavchavadze resurrects in research-based works incorporating antique fabric, text, and digital prints. Her Soggy Diary references Fuller’s death in a shipwreck.

But Chavchavadze’s artwork about her own family history seems to be more about self-assertion. “It’s a way of figuring out who I am and expressing myself,” she says. It’s also a process of exposure and concealment that reconfigures the past, as if in a lesson learned from her grandparents.

“The least interesting thing to me is their aristocratic background,” says Chavchavadze. “What’s really interesting to me is that they left that behind and transformed themselves.”

Chavchavadze inherited her grandparents’ Wellfleet house with her sister, Marusya, when they were in their 20s. “It was a mess,” says Chavchavadze. They rented it out for years and then in 2004, when they sold a piece of the land, Chavchavadze and her husband, PK Ramani, renovated the house, working to retain its modest New England character.

The effort marked a time when Chavchavadze felt the need to start a new chapter. “We just put everything in the attic and painted,” she says. “I had to get out from under that weight of history.”

In 2019, Chavchavadze decided to take the boxes back out to see what pieces of the past she might find. She came upon a few treasures, including a painting of her grandparents by their friend Mary Hackett and a small sculpture of a boy’s head that had been displayed on the mantelpiece when Chavchavadze was growing up.

The name Barthé was written on the back of the piece, and after some research Chavchavadze realized it was typical of Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richmond Barthé’s work. He was known for his elegant, idealized modernist sculptures of Black men.

She also got in touch with Margaret Rose Vendryes, an art historian who wrote a monograph on Barthé. “Margaret knew exactly what the piece was because there are several of them,” says Chavchavadze. A recent exhibition about the Harlem Renaissance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City included one of the same heads, although with a different hand-carved base.

Vendryes couldn’t find any record of the Cape in Barthé’s archives. But Chavchavadze found a photograph of him in a family album. And a similar photo of her grandfather in the same reclining position outside their Wellfleet house, likely taken by Barthé. Then Vendryes came across a photograph of Paul in his World War II Red Cross uniform in Barthé’s archives. Vendryes told her that Barthé had photographs only of men he was involved with, and Chavchavadze believes that a romantic connection between the two was possible. “My grandparents had a bit of an open marriage in their younger days, although they were devoted to each other,” she says.

The fragments of this story soon turned into art. Chavchavadze had already been working on a project called “Footnotes,” a series of digital prints created from assemblages of mixed-media art, artifacts, and archival material. Their purpose is to reactivate forgotten history.

In Footnote: Richmond Barthé (An Affair of Love), Chavchavadze presents her collected artifacts: a photograph of Barthé’s sculpture commands the center of the composition with archival photographs and branches radiating from it. There’s a spiky pod of a horse chestnut, evoking the violence of being Black in America at the time of the men’s friendship, and a branch from a tree outside the Wellfleet house that stays green year-round, a symbol of a “sweet relationship that’s still green,” according to Chavchavadze.

“It’s not just documentation,” says Chavchavadze. “It evokes this relationship through different things.” What drew her to the story is that it is about two people from radically different backgrounds reaching across the divide toward a friendship, she says. “That seems super important right now.”

In the bottom left-hand corner of the composition is a book with the inscription “To my friend Paul, who is also a fellow seeker. from Barthé.” Chavchavadze found the book The Wisdom of the Overself in her grandparents’ library after discovering the sculpture.

Chavchavadze’s artwork lays out the artifacts that tell this story in a loose fashion, suspended in the warm yellow ground of the digital print. There’s much left unanswered and much speculated upon. Here, history is no longer a burden or a nagging question but rather a reality reconfigured by the artist’s imagination, a work of art, a place where intrigue and beauty are embodied.