New Jersey to host Armenian exhibition

PanARMENIAN.Net - Bergen Community College’s Gallery Bergen, NJ, in cooperation with the College’s Center for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation will host the exhibition titled “Fractured History, Reconstructing Identity: Degrees of Westernization in Armenian Painting and Other Mediums.”

The exhibit’s curator Vicki Shoghag Hovanessian is an avid collector of Western and Armenian art for more than 30 years. The gallery will open the exhibit with a ceremony on Tuesday, April 3, 2012 and will remain on display until Thursday, April 26, 2012 in Gallery Bergen in West Hall on the College’s main campus in Paramus.

Peter Balakian, an author and scholar, will speak at a closing gallery ceremony on April 26. He serves as the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities and director of creative writing in Colgate University’s English department. Mr. Balakian won the PEN/Albrand Prize for his memoir, “Black Dog of Fate,” which earned New York Times Notable Book honors, and the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize for his book, “The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response.”

Designed to commemorate the 97th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, the exhibition is comprised of contemporary paintings, sculptures and works in other mediums, presented by Armenian artists, who have based their works on their homeland and the diaspora (migration). As the title indicates, the exhibition explores the extent to which a given work is both formalistically connected to a major twentieth-century aesthetic trajectory and linked to the unique socio-historical context of Armenian culture.

Despite the turbulent historical phases of Armenia during the first quarter of the twentieth century, followed by the suppression of Armenian culture’s national identity within the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic that persisted until 1990, a succinct glimpse at artworks of the past two decades provides signs of introspection, ambition, innovation, diversity, optimism and progress within Armenian culture.

Founded at Bergen Community College in 2009, the Center for Peace, Justice and Reconciliation (CPJR) exists to develop the passion and skills needed to work for peace, justice, and reconciliation, with a special focus on the Armenian historical and cultural context.

Within the sphere of today’s rapidly changing aesthetic boundaries, this exhibition of Hovanessian’s pays a long-standing and essential tribute to the accomplishments of a group of Armenian artists whose fractured history and reconstructed identity remains to be universally assessed and culturally recognized.

Artists whose work is featured include: Arevik Arevshatian, Gagik Aroutiunian, Assadour, Ashot Bayandour, Arman Grigorian, Ruben Grigorian, Sarkis Hamalbashian, Hamlet Hovsepian, Aram Jibilian, Vasken Kalayjian, Mariam Khachatrian, Haig Kocharian, Vartoush Magarian, Karine Matsakian, Kardash Onnig, Rudik Petrosian, Vahan Rumelian, Ararat Sarkissian, Arthur Sarkissian, William Saroyan, Shanoor, Albert Vartanian

Bergen Community College based in Paramus is a public two-year coeducational college, enrolling more than 17,000 students at locations in Paramus, the Philip J. Ciarco Jr. Learning Center in Hackensack and Bergen Community College at the Meadowlands in Lyndhurst. The College offers associate degree, certificate and continuing education programs in a variety of fields, The Paramus Post reported.