Hrag Vartanian

I published this in AGBU News magazine back in April 1999 but I haven’t looked at it for ages. I came across it earlier this year and decided to post it on my blog for April 24.

Even though I was born in Aleppo, I really grew up in Toronto, which was a vastly less coherent [...]

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Always unconventional, Armenian American artist Onnig Kardash, staged a protest/performance on April 24, 1969 in front of the St. Vartan Armenian Cathedral in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood. The action seemed to underscore the need for love in the face of hate.
April 24 is the traditional day to commemorate the victims of the Armenian Genocide, Kardash’s [...]

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From Artmika’s Unzipped blog we get a look at a feminist art exhibition in a post-Soviet society..which coincidentally is still in the midst of a controversial election that may not yet be resolved…Artmika writes:
As mentioned in my previous post, the exhibition of feminist art “Gender Trouble” opened on 7 April in Armenia’s capital Yerevan to [...]

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When I discovered that the International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) started using Flickr I had a renewed sense of hope that humanitarian aid organizations could finally be finding their voice on the World Wide Web. I can’t imagine a better tool to project the human face of tragedy and renewal [...]

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In the face of denial and apathy, Armenian Americans have had to be creative as to how to commemorate the Armenian Genocide without falling into self-pity and a culture of victimhood.
In 1996, artist Daniel V. Hejinian created one of the most ingenuous solutions. He began displaying simple graphic Armenian Genocide commemorative billboards in Watertown, just [...]

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