Watertown Celebrates "Passage" Mural Success and Invites Public to Self-Guided Arshile Gorky Tour

Inspired by Gorky's dynamic palette and flowing forms, the "Passage" mural by Brandon Gaia Marshall is a powerful visual tribute to Gorky's life and work, and to the resilience of those impacted by the Armenian Genocide. The mural serves as a poignant reminder of displacement and trauma, expressed through a shared language of color, abstract shapes, and representational imagery. We were especially proud that high school assistants Isabelle Gorham and Charlotte learned spray painting techniques directly from Marshall during the project, highlighting the educational impact of this public artwork.

While the reception has passed, the spirit of "100 Years of Arshile Gorky" continues! We encourage everyone to experience the impact of this seminal artist on Watertown by embarking on a self-guided tour, created with support from Watertown Savings Bank and project partners.

Begin your journey at the stunning "Passage" mural on the Watertown-Cambridge Greenway at the Grove Street underpass. From there, venture to Coolidge Hill Road and Dexter Avenue, where you can find granite markers near Gorky's former homes. Be sure to visit the intersection of Dexter Avenue and Hazel Avenue, now officially named "Arshile Gorky Square," a permanent tribute to his time in our community. See the full route online through StoryMaps: https://arcg.is/04bOWS

The "100 Years of Arshile Gorky" commemoration will culminate with a highly anticipated exhibition at the Armenian Museum of America, opening in December 2025. This exhibition will serve as a powerful capstone to our year-long celebration, offering a deeper dive into Gorky's life and artistic contributions. We look forward to sharing more details about this exciting event as the opening approaches.

Watertown is proud to celebrate Arshile Gorky's enduring legacy as an artist, an immigrant, and a luminary of our community. We invite you to explore his profound connection to Watertown through the "Passage" mural and the new self-guided tour.

Stories Through Stitch and Song: New Permanent Displays on Armenian American Life

by Collections Manager, Caprice Erickson

Recently, two new display cases have been added to our permanent exhibition galleries on the second floor. These cases tell two different stories that are significant to the Armenian American community in Boston through music, craft, and dance.

Our first new case honors the late Susan Lind-Sinanian (1948-2025), our Textile Curator, friend, and colleague. Susan's impact on our museum is reflected in this display through her personal items, curatorial contributions, and photographs of her passionate engagement with her Armenian heritage. She was an expert on Armenian folk culture, with strong mastery in embroidery, dance, and cooking. She was a fountain of knowledge and a cornerstone in the Armenian American community, having worked nationally and internationally with other museums and groups to share her vital cultural expertise. This display is on view in our Stitching to Survive exhibition which Susan curated, another illustration of her legacy here at the museum.

The second case we have added can be found in our music exhibition. This display discusses the development of Armenian American music, evolving from the experiences and musical tastes of the children and descendants of Armenian immigrants in the United States. The objects we've used to highlight this cultural musical development belonged to the Hye-Echoes Ensemble, a Boston-area group that delighted audiences from 1958 to 2018. Our Curator, Gary Lind-Sinanian, has talked about the Hye Echoes Ensemble in our Treasures from our Collection video series by showcasing items and music gifted to the museum by Greg Krikorian, a member of the band. (Hye Echoes Ensemble (Treasures from Our Collection)

Having the opportunity to display and share these important objects is at the core of our museum's mission to not only preserve Armenian heritage, but to share our culture and stories with the world.

Mural Honors Arshile Gorky & Armenian Resilience

The Armenian Museum of America is proud to be part of the 100 Years of Arshile Gorky Committee, honoring the life and legacy of one of the most influential artists of the 20th century.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who joined us on Tuesday, June 10 for the unveiling of the mural, Passage. A special thanks to artist Brandon Gaia Marshall for creating this powerful mural, which draws on Gorky’s vibrant palette and organic forms to honor not only his artistic legacy but also the strength and resilience of those affected by the Armenian Genocide.

Through color, abstraction, and symbolism, Passage stands as a public reminder of displacement, survival, and the enduring power of cultural expression, as noted by our Executive Director Jason Sohigian and several speakers at the event. The mural can be viewed at the Grove Street underpass along the Watertown-Cambridge Greenway in Watertown, MA—we invite you to experience it in person and reflect on the story it tells.

Artscope: Varujan Boghosian’s Magical Oddities are a Delight

By Rachel Flood Page, Artscope

Whimsical and playful, surreal and profound, "Fragments of Memory" at the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown firmly places Armenian American artist Varujan Boghosian in the company of influential assemblage artists like Joseph Cornell, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali. Art lovers who appreciate oddities, hidden stories in nooks and crannies, and finding something new every time they take a second look, will delight in digging deep into the incredible portfolio of Boghosian.

Raised in Connecticut by working class parents, young Boghosian was inspired by his teacher, and poet, Constance Carrier, who led him to a love of stories. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he attended art school in Boston, Italy and under the tutelage of Josef Albers at Yale. Throughout his career, his works have been exhibited in museums across the country and in public collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A beloved member of the Provincetown artistic community, his work was often on view in friend Berta Walker's gallery. Boghosian was earnestly, and devotedly, an educator for much of his life, his longest tenure at Dartmouth College, from 1968 to 1996.

Varujan Boghosian

As the son of Armenian immigrants who left their home to escape a genocide, it is not a surprise that Boghosian found preciousness in lost or discarded things. His constructions are clearly so lovingly created, adding an additional layer of profundity to his enigmatic work. He called himself a "junk collector" but really, he was a junk connoisseur, seeking out objects that held meaning for him, tied to the themes he wanted to explore. He often collected multiples of the same thing — including butterflies, children's blocks, letters, human figures, and maps.

"Fragments of Memory" includes a video of Boghosian where the artist is interviewed while enthusiastically rifling through a large warehouse of second-hand objects, stating: "You never have enough, the more you have, the more opportunities you have." The video's inclusion was a wonderful choice by curator Ryann Casey, allowing Boghosian's kindness, humor, and curious nature to inform the visitor's experience.

Describing his process, friends noted that Boghosian would often work on multiple pieces at once, some taking a considerable amount of time to be finished. Every construction for him was a journey of waiting, of finding, of deciding, and of finally placing the object, or fragment of a print, or piece of wallpaper, exactly where it was meant to be. Poet Stanley Kunitz wrote the poem "Chariot" in 1989 about his friend's workshop, and likely the beginnings of what became "Variation of a Constellation," on display in this exhibition,

"Here everything waits to be renewed. That horse-age wagon wheel propped in the corner against an empty picture-frame even in its state of disrepair, minus three spokes, looks poised for flight."

While entirely amiable, one must have a sense of humor to be as beloved a professor as he was, and Boghosian's approach was meticulous. Many of his constructions contain intricate mosaics, such as the perfectly puzzled backdrop of "The Heart of the Matter," 1992. This precision also appears in his watercolors and drawings. In an early work from 1954, the watercolor "Perugia," bright blocks of vibrant color in a geometric pattern are framed not by lines, but by hundreds of tiny dots creating the borders of the image. Boghosian's pointillist approach appears in his "Studies for Orpheus" from 1963. The physicality of these pieces is palpable, tiny nails hammered close together in concentric patterns on a wooden hat block - one can imagine the artist bent over and dexterously tapping in each individual nail with intense focus, resulting in something quite beautiful.

Heart of the Matter

"Studies for Orpheus" evokes another theme throughout his work, that of constellations, and in particular, maps of stars that present the images from myth that inspired their naming such as an "Untitled" collage where he placed one of Dali's painted illusory figures, a kind of assemblage itself, in front of an illustrated constellation map. Another piece of Dali's work appears in "Combat," two fighting figures, a fragment of Dali's "Le Spectre des Sex Appeal," encircled by a swirl of Boghosian's meticulously placed white dots, reminiscent of spiraling light patterns in Otto Piene's work.

Boghosian's interest in mythology, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in particular, is well known, and the imagery that he imagined representing the tale is threaded throughout his constructions. In his two- and three-dimensional works, Orpheus is often represented by a bird, his love for Eurydice by a butterfly, or, in the case of "The Heart of the Matter," 1992, two intertwined hearts. This piece also contains an ominous depiction of Charon (or perhaps Hades), ferryman of the dead, a welded assemblage of a bronze face, collar, and horns. This being is seen in other works, such as in "Variation of a Constellation" in the center of the wooden wheel.

Boghosian also presents Orpheus as a figure wearing a conical hat, seen in "Breaking Through (Black)," and "Four Short Stories," 1993. Contemporaries like Joseph Cornell were drawn to creating a contained collection of objects within a frame, disrupting the typical flat painting with layers of objects, even inviting viewers to touch and physically interact with the piece. Boghosian's constructions don't need to be invited to interact with you, they are already on your plane, even when encased in a frame they still pop out of it.

In "Breaking Through (Black)," Boghosian stretched a worn rectangle of black painted canvas into a wooden frame and intentionally ripped the fabric to reveal the figure of Orpheus emerging from the darkness. The hat reaches higher than the frame, emphasizing the moment of his return to earth, likely seconds before his fateful mistake. Next to this work in striking juxtaposition, "Breaking Through," 1998, depicts Orpheus bursting through the canvas into a beautifully constructed collage of objects in vibrant reds and blues against plain wood, again showing the figure returning to the world of color and life.

Something inescapable when interacting with Boghosian's constructions is his playfulness and whimsy. "Rainbow, Rainbow, Rainbow," 2003, is a diverting combination of a fish shaped baking dish, and a child's stained-glass, framed by the word "rainbow" repeatedly spelled out in tiles. In "Over the Top," 2012, an acrobat launches himself over a wooden top (get it?). If you liked that one, he'll tell you another in "Locked Trunk," an elephant figurine with a padlock fused to its nose. Boghosian also enjoyed poking fun at fellow artists. Poor Van Gogh, Boghosian's portrait of the artist, "Vincent (Ear and Letters)," 2006, is simply that, an ear, and cut out letters spelling 'Vincent' over and over again. "For Max Ernst," 2013, is a collage of a paper doll in front of geometric wallpaper. The doll's face is nothing but a white circle, perhaps referencing Ernst's tendency to obscure, or even completely remove women's faces in his paintings and collages. "Swan for Marcel," 2011, is one of Boghosian's more cluttered collages, a collection of images hinting at Duchamp's found objects.

Rainbow, Rainbow, Rainbow

Over the Top

Swan for Marcel

Boghosian's work dances between and through the movements of Dada, assemblage art, and surrealism in conversation with artists like Cornell, Ernst, Duchamp, Dali and others. He is also a style completely unto himself. Viewers not only see glimpses of the artist in the constructions he creates, but in two self-portraits, "Self Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," 1989, and "Self Portrait as a Lion," 2006, two very different choices by Boghosian in self-representation. The earlier portrait is a small child with patched clothes, hard at work constructing with bright blue paper and a butterfly, in the later one he presents himself as the assemblage, a man with a lion's head.

Self Portrait as a Lion

"Fragments of Memory" is a profound delight. Visitors are inspired to move back and forth between each piece, finding details and thinking where have I seen that before? What does it mean when it's here in relation with this object, versus another one? There's another butterfly! Every fragment he collected and used in his constructions had a story already, he just told it a little differently. Along with the objects the stories themselves became his materials, everything was endowed with meaning, and in true enigmatic fashion, he chose whether or not to show you all of it, keeping us, his students, curious and inspired.

Reposted with permission from Artscope Magazine.

Caprice Erickson Discusses Significance of Armenian Museum Collection at Mass History Conference

On June 2, our Collections Manager Caprice Erickson presented a talk at the Mass History Conference on "Empathy in Museum Collections: A Glimpse into the Collection at the Armenian Museum of America” at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This year’s conference theme, “Connecting and Caring Through History,” encourages us to reconnect with our communities and the “why” behind what we do. With a myriad of digital and traditional tools at our disposal, there are more ways than ever to make history public. How can we offer interpretations that tell diverse stories and bridge the gap between past and present?

“With a vibrant culture and an ancient history, Armenians add an ornamental thread to our diverse social tapestry in America. Connecting with their history helps us understand why many Armenians came to America and can also encourage us to reflect on how our own ancestors came to be here,” said Erickson during her illustrated talk.

Caprice Erickson obtained her BA at the University of St. Thomas in Houston in History with a concentration in Irish Studies and Russian Studies. In 2018, she received her MLitt in Museum and Gallery Studies from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where she conducted research on the intangible cultural heritage of the Scottish Gaelic language. Before joining the Museum in 2024, she worked at Houston’s Holocaust Museum.