Hrag Vartanian

I’m not a big drinker but who doesn’t love St. Patrick’s Day.
This past Monday I ventured to McSorley’s on E7th Street (the oldest Irish tavern in New York and the oldest continuously operated bar in the city) to have a pint and gawk at the disgusting interior…did you know they have wishbones on the chandelier [...]

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I’ve posted the whole series of photos and notes from Prof. Christopher B. Steiner’s lecture “Inside an Outsider Art: Paying a Visit to Elizabeth Tashjian’s Nut Museum,” which was part of the Armenian Diaspora Identity/Culture conference at Columbia University yesterday.
Considering I have a severe nut allergy, I found this character, who was raised on the [...]

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The ancient Armenian tradition of khachkars (literally meaning “cross-stone” in Armenian) has made its way to America and woven its way into Armenian communities around the world.
Los Angeles, where 400,000 people of Armenian heritage reside, is a particularly rich field for the seeds of this art form to grow. Unfortunately, people still mistakenly assume [...]

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Last night (Sun. Feb. 17 at 6pm), New York’s Gartal book reading series continued with all the authors of (An)daratsutian Mej [In the (Un)space] at the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village. The book is published by the Women’s Resource Center of Yerevan, Armenia.Gartal founder and visionary, Nancy Agabian, hosted the special trilingual reading with [...]

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I caught up with a colleague and friend, Ellen Pearlman, who is now dividing her time between Beijing and Bushwick (yes, the scrappy Brooklyn neighborhood is attracting the next wave of art cognoscenti). She is an wonderful writer, photographer and film maker and editor-at-large for The Brooklyn Rail who has recently finished Nothing and Everything [...]

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