The editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic, Hrag Vartanian is an art critic, curator, artist, and lecturer on contemporary art with an expertise on the intersection of art and politics.
Breaking news, award-winning reporting, informed opinions, and quality conversations about art have helped Hyperallergic reach an audience of over a million people each month.
Some of his notable essays from the past few years include “Imagining the Future Before Us: Forward to Sharon Louden’s The Artist as Culture Producer”, “Adrian Paci Shows Us How We Mourn the Death of Dictators,” and “The Elusive Index of Relationships Between Everyone.”
He started podcasting regularly in 2016, and in 2018 he launched Art Movements, which is a weekly podcast.
Notable episodes have explored why the female painters of Abstract Expressionism are largely overlooked, he traveled to North Dakota to record a three-part series (1, 2, 3) from the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock, and he composed a long-form audio essay about the life and art of David Wojnarowicz that talks to the deceased artist’s friends, his friend-turned-biographer, and the ACT UP members who spearheaded the Whitney Museum actions at the retrospective in 2018.
In the summer of 2019, he created a four-part series, in conjunction with the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, that explores the use of clay and ceramic in contemporary art and the role of museums in this renaissance. The first podcast spoke to artist Kent Monkman about the role of museums, the second featured Shary Boyle talking about feminism and class-consciousness in clay, the third episode explored blackface in Canada through the lens of an 18th-century harlequin figure in the museum’s collection, and the final episode spoke to four experts about an ancient Maya plate and how it is connected to today’s headlines.
He has curated exhibitions and published in alternative venues and formats for two decades, and in 2017, he began a 10-year project titled Fixed Point Perspective, which examines the contemporary legacy of Ottoman studio photography.
In April 2018, he created a collaborative installation with artist Sharon Louden at the Mary Sharpe and Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY. Titled Origins, it explored the five-year professional and personal friendship between the pair as a starting point for a bigger conversation about beginnings and ends. The video from the installation is also available on his YouTube channel. A new iteration of the collaboration was on view at Signs and Signals on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (September 4–October 11, 2019) this past fall. He also showed his koan watercolors for the first time at C24 Gallery in New York(September 26–November 29, 2019).
He also tweets a lot.