Providence Journal , RI
April 24 2005

John Avakian grapples with the Armenian Genocide, through art

BY BILL VAN SICLEN
Journal Arts Writer

For years, Massachusetts artist John Avakian ran from his past — ran
from the shadows and silences in his family’s history and from his
own memories of growing up as the only son of survivors of the
Armenian Genocide.

Now Avakian, who’s having a flurry of shows at Providence galleries
this spring, has embraced what he once tried to flee.

“I was in total denial,” he says during a phone interview from his
home in Sharon, Mass. “Deep down, I knew the truth. I knew that my
parents have lived through his horrible massacre. But I couldn’t
admit it to myself.”

Avakian says the turning point came in the mid-1990s, when his
then-girlfriend tricked him into visiting a private therapist.

“She told me the therapy sessions were for her, when they were really
for me,” he says. “She knew I’d never do it on my own. By the end of
the first session, I was crying like a baby. It all just poured out
of me.”

Since then, Avakian’s work has focused almost exclusively on the
Armenian Genocide, which began in 1915 and eventually claimed the
lives of more than a million Armenians. This year marks its 90th
anniversary.

“It’s amazing that it’s been 90 years, and we’re only just beginning
to talk about it,” Avakian says. “In my own case, it took years of
therapy before I could really discuss it. But as a society, we’re
still in denial.”

Avakian hopes his current work, which is on display at the Mathewson
Street Methodist Church through April 29 and in a group show at
Gallery Z on Atwells Avenue through May 28, will help spark greater
awareness of the tragedy.

A printmaking instructor at Northeastern University and the Boston
Museum School, Avakian specializes in one-of-a-kind prints known as
monotypes. Often his starting point is a photographic image copied
from a book or downloaded from the Internet. Typically, the
photographs show mass graves, hooded corpses and evidence of other
atrocities committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians.

“Early in my career, I would have recoiled from using that kind of
imagery,” Avakian says. “It’s just too raw, too gruesome. But now I
think the world needs to see what happened. It needs to see the
horror.”

At the same time, Avakian admits that he tries to tone down the raw
immediacy of the images by adding splashes of color, bits of poetry
and other elements. The result, he says, is a mix of beauty and
barbarity.

“I come from a humanist background, where beauty is the ultimate goal
of art, even if the subject matter is ugly,” he says.

Both the Mathewson and Gallery Z shows feature works from an ongoing
series Avakian calls “Man’s Inhumanity to Man: If I Begin to Cry, I
Will Cry Forever.” The title for the series comes from a confession
Avakian made at one of his therapy sessions.

“At one point, I told the therapist that I felt like I was about to
cry,” he recalls. “The therapist said, ‘Then why don’t you?’ I
answered that I was afraid that if started crying that I would keep
on crying forever.”

“They shut me out”

Born in Worcester, Avakian grew up in a family where memories of the
Armenian Genocide were unspoken yet ever-present. He says his parents
rarely talked about their experiences, and when they did, they often
went to great lengths to make sure their son never understood what
they were saying.

“Every now and then, I’d stumble in while they were talking about
it,” Avakian says. “Immediately, they’d switch from speaking
Armenian, which I understood, to Turkish, which I didn’t. They shut
me out.”

By the time he graduated from high school, Avakian says he had
internalized his parents’ habit of not speaking about the past.
Though already active as an artist, he says he never considered
exploring his family’s history.

The silence continued at Yale University, where Avakian earned
undergraduate and graduate degrees in painting, and at Boston’s
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where he studied printmaking from
1990 to 1994.

Avakian says the first sign that something was amiss came when he saw
a photograph of an electric chair and couldn’t get the image out of
his mind.

“At the time, everything I was doing was totally abstract,” he
recalls. “No pictures or images of any kind. But once I saw this
picture, I just couldn’t shake it. I had no idea why it affected me
that way, but it did.”

Then came the therapy sessions with his girlfriend. Suddenly, the
picture of the electric chair made perfect sense.

“It was a symbol of state-sanctioned death,” Avakian says. “In a
sense, it crystallized all the feelings I’d learned to bury.”

Immersed in history

Since then, Avakian has immersed himself in Armenian history,
including the campaign of mass killings now known as the Armenian
Genocide or holocaust. Concentrated mainly in the Anatolian region of
present-day Turkey, the violence resulted in the death or expulsion
of an estimated 2 million people.

He’s also learned more about his own parents’ backgrounds, including
the horrific story of how his mother, as a child, had been forced to
watch as Turkish soldiers slaughtered most of her family.

“No wonder she didn’t want to talk about it,” Avakian says. “The pain
must have been overwhelming.”

Note: In addition to the Gallery Z and Mathewson Street Church
exhibits, Avakian is also the focus of two other Providence-area
shows. From May 4 to 3, his prints will be on display at the Jewish
Community Center at 401 Elmgrove Ave., and from May 19 to June 30 at
the Hunt-Cavanagh Gallery at Providence College.