May 14, 2012
On Friday, April 20th, 2012, a large audience at the Toronto AGBU Centre listened with rapt attention to Neery Melkonian’s passionate presentation on her on-going exhibition project entitled Accented Feminism: Armenian Women and Art, from Representation to Self-Representation. Her aim, simply put, is to curate an exhibition of predominantly contemporary artistic works by Armenian women making visible, literally and figuratively, their contribution to society.
Ms. Melkonian is an independent critic, writer, teacher, arts administrator and curator based in New York City. She has organized more than twenty solo art exhibitions and several traveling group-exhibits including Sniper’s Nest: Art that has lived with Lucy R. Lippard based on the private collection of the noted American author and activist. Over the years she has contributed reviews and interviews to many publications, amongst them the AGBU Arts magazine, ARARAT. The vast and diverse talents she has demonstrated whilst working in the United States have earned her great praise.
Her resolve seems to be to elevate and add meaning to existence through the visual arts. This commitment has taken her on various journeys.
Ms. Melkonian founded NK Arts in 1999, a United States based non-profit organization. Shortly thereafter, she established an annual arts festival in Shushi, the once vibrant Armenian cultural centre of the Caucasus. The intent was to produce art projects to stimulate economic growth in that isolated region of the world, revive local crafts on the verge of extinction, and bring dignity and pride to a populace still recovering from a brutal war. Ms. Melkonian remained NK Arts’ director for a number of years.
More recently she opened an exhibition at Pratt Institute’s Manhattan Gallery entitled Blind Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a former Empire. The project, a reformulation of which is scheduled to open in Yerevan and Istanbul next year, deals with the contemporary traces of cultures, people and places impacted by the Ottoman rupture.
Melkonian recounted how she was introduced to feminism through art while pursuing graduate studies in art history at UCLA in the 1980s, and how it bothered her that at the time no Armenian women artists could be found in the canons of Western art history. So she began to research the topic independently. A few years ago, when she noticed a repetition of such exclusions within major exhibits honoring women artists internationally she decided to do something about it. Armenian women have been present in art since pagan times, through Medieval and Ottoman periods, as well as Soviet and Cold war eras. Accented Feminism will map such presences while paying attention to the concerns expressed in contemporary art made by Armenian women worldwide.
The thought for the project Accented Feminism: Armenian Women and Art began to take definite shape whilst she taught a summer course for curators in Yerevan. Two years later, in 2009, some of those same ideas were echoed in a paper she presented during the Hrant Dink Memorial Workshop in Istanbul.
Ms. Melkonian has been developing the project since then by inviting other researchers and curators to join the phase one of her efforts which she hopes will lead to a related conference in Armenia. She has garnered support from a wide variety of individuals and institutions as well as the Cultural Ministry of the Republic of Armenia. As she travels to different cities to speak about the project she also encourages individuals from respective communities to mobilize and help raise the financial support necessary to bring such a project to fruition. The enthusiastic response that Ms. Melkonian received at the end of her presentation in Toronto indicates that her thoughts found resonance amongst the audience here as well. If interested to help or learn more about the project you may write to AccentedFeminism@aol.com.
isa basmajian