Arts & Culture

Armenian culture and tradition, once subsumed into Byzantine or medieval studies, now has its own separate but important place in the history of art and civilization along with others such as Venice, Rome, and Greece thanks to a groundbreaking exhibition entitled Armenia! at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Translated into several languages, Mariam Petrosyan’s epic novel “The Gray House” has enchanted readers across the world. In this first book review, Lilit Margaryan speaks with the elusive Petrosyan about her life and the life of a novel that took 18 years to write.

Despite its obvious ruin, Stepanakert’s grand dramatic theater captures the beauty of a past era and now there are efforts to restore the structure’s life and soul in the same spirit of how it was built.

In this first piece for EVN Report, Lizzy Vartanian Collier looks at Armenia’s contemporary art scene through the work and challenges of three curators.

A tucked away city within a city, the district of Kond in Yerevan has a rich history and a promising future only if authorities undertake a large-scale restoration. What are the stories of Kond and what does the future hold for one of the oldest quarters in the country’s capital?

Born in Gyumri in the late 19th century, Sergey Merkurov is considered the greatest Soviet master of death masks. He was highly sought after to take the death masks of various Soviet luminaries and leaders, as well as prominent cultural figures of the era.

In the second part of photographer Davit Nersisyan's larger body of work about the visually impaired in Armenia, Nersisyan explores the most intimate physical spaces of the visually impaired - their own rooms - by asking the person who inhabits the space but does not see it to map it.

In her piece on (not)editing Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s new novel “The Brick House,” author and editor Tatiana Ryckman says that Marcom's fiction changed her reading and writing life forever.

Visual artist Ruben Malayan’s poster art that he created during the Velvet Revolution in Armenia is a fusion of his passion for calligraphy and the momentous events sweeping across the country.

For decades, production of historical texts in Armenia was in the tight grip of Soviet state ideology. Post-independence, some topics previously repressed or omitted found their way back into Armenian history textbooks, however “memory gaps” remain.