About

Hrag Vartanian (he/they) is an art critic, writer, curator, and lecturer on contemporary art with an expertise in the intersection of art and politics. He is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic, an independent art publication created in 2009 with his spouse, Veken Gueyikian.

Under Vartanian’s leadership, Hyperallergic has grown to reach millions of readers per year and is credited with revitalizing arts journalism over the last two decades as audiences moved online. He has helped foster a new generation of writers who reject art market-oriented coverage to focus on criticism and reporting that appeals to a broader cultural audience.

Vartanian is the host of the Hyperallergic podcast, which has released more than 100 episodes and featured prominent guests such as Audrey Flack, Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Michael Rakowitz, Shahzia Sikander, John Yau and artists at the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

Throughout his career, Vartanian has forged a path of unconventional art writing that embraces ephemerality, speed, and new forms of criticism, all inspired by his own journaling practice and personal blog started in 2006. 

His original namesake blog was very active between 2006 and 2010 and focused on politics, writing, and mostly art. The art blog had thousands of daily readers and included guest contributors. It was part of the Culture Pundits network. He also wrote the Re:Public column about street art and politics for ArtCat Zine (2007–2009).

His work often explores ideas around trauma, displacement, decolonization, diasporan consciousness, racialization, propaganda, community engagement and the evolving role of art in society.

He’s appeared in a number of documentaries, including Banksy Does New York (2014), about the evasive street artist’s unofficial residency in New York City in the fall of 2013, and the award-winning Out of the Picture (2024), which is a feature-length film about art critics living through a period of transformation for both art and media.

In addition to essays, such as “Where is the Public Discourse Around Art and Technology?” written in 2021 for the National Endowment for the Arts and “Imagining the Future Before Us” for The Artist as Culture Producer, edited by Sharon Louden, Vartanian has given numerous keynote lectures, including at the American Craft Council in 2019 about the role of craft in his family and how it influenced his evolution as a writer. He has also participated in hundreds of grassroots events in smaller venues across the country where he speaks to artists, critics and art lovers more directly and intimately.

Vartanian has also published literary essays in various anthologies and books, including We Are All Armenian (2023) and Artists as Writers (2025), and he’s been engaged with the topic of race in America, including a conversation with Sophia Armen and Aram Ghoogasian for the Los Angeles Review of Books (Quarterly Journal: No. 27, Mistakes, August 2020) titled “Beyond Jermag Yev Sev: A Roundtable on Armenian-American Identity.”

In the fall of 2024, he delivered a performance lecture, titled “Roots Across Diasporan Time,” with Aroussiak Gabrielian at the Artsakh Uprooted: Aftermaths of Displacement symposium at the University of Southern California. In 2025, he spoke as part of the Templeton Colloquium in Art History at UC Davis on “Cultural Heritage at Stake: Between Conservation and Criminality.”

Vartanian has created various curatorial projects through Hyperallergic that embrace liminal spaces, including a 2010 pioneering interactive art exhibition that explored social media, “#TheSocialGraph,” “Presents: Three Months of Mail Art” in 2011, and “The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium” in 2013. He has also curated exhibitions or projects at Storefront BK gallery, Auxiliary Projects, Signs and Symbols, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Steinberg Museum of Art at Long Island University.

Vartanian has been a visiting critic at the Rhode Island School of Design, University of California-Davis, Brooklyn College, Pratt Institute, Indiana University and Columbia University, among many others, and was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University in 2024. He was a lead mentor at the Chautauqua School of Art from 2019-2022. 

He is the recipient of the Susan C. Larsen Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts Writing by the Rabkin Foundation in 2024.

Vartanian and Gueyikian live in Brooklyn, New York.

You can subscribe to Hyperallergic’s newsletter, his personal email list, or find him on Bluesky.