PRESS RELEASE
Armenian Apostolic Church of Crescenta Valley-Education Committee
6252 Honolulu Ave.
La Crescenta, CA. 91214
Tel: 818-244-9645
E-mail: [email protected]

Prof.  Levon Chookaszian will be the guest speaker on “Armenian Massacres,
Liberation Struggle, Genocide and Armenian Painters” at Armenian Apostolic
Church of Crescenta Valley, located at Western Prelacy’s “Dikran and Zarouhi
Der Ghazarian” Hall, at 6252 Honolulu Ave., La Crescenta, California on
Sunday, January 20, 2013 at 1pm, following the Divine liturgy, which starts
at 11am.

The Armenian Massacres of 1895-96 and of 1905-1907 stimulated the appearance
of topics related to those events in the works of Armenian painters. Later
on, numerous Armenian artworks were produced by different artists depicting
those horrible pages of Armenian modern history. Since that time, the first
images of orphans and refugees in Armenian painting have appeared. During
the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1922, certain painters became the eyewitnesses
of deportation of the Armenian people from their native lands and portrayed
them, sometimes even illegally, endangering their own lives. The Armenian
Genocide of 1915-1922 brought another strong wave of topics connected with
loss of historical homeland. The mass tragedies of those years created
generations of painters who grew up in orphanages in foreign countries and
produced artworks full of sadness and nostalgia throughout their lives.

For many decades only painters of the Armenian Diaspora were able to
illustrate the events of the national catastrophe. Until the collapse of the
Soviet Union, it was not customary for Armenian painters to illustrate
subjects related to the Armenian Liberation struggle and the Armenian
Massacres or the Armenian Genocide. The shortcomings of the Soviet system
and the ideological pressure and censorship were not encouraging to that
kind of activity and were creating obstacles and problems for painters and
sculptors.

Dr.,Prof. Levon Chookaszian was born in Yerevan, Armenia. He graduated from
Yerevan State University in 1974 with a degree in philology, and is the
author of two monographs. He has published close to four hundred articles
and reviews for scholarly journals and newspapers and has prepared numerous
entries on Armenian art, painters, sculptors, and architects for the
Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia, the Armenian Question Encyclopedia, the
Armenian Abridged Encyclopedia and the Saur Allgemeines Kunstlerlexikon
(Germany, Munchen-Leipzig). He has participated in many international
congresses and symposia on the topic of Armenian, Georgian, Persian, and
Byzantine art. Dr. Chookaszian and his brother Garegin Chookaszian are the
initiators of an Armenian Art Database.

Dr. Chookaszian has delivered numerous lectures on Armenian art at
universities, libraries and museums in Italy, USA, Canada, Germany, Hungary,
and Romania.  This event, which is organized by Crescenta Valley Church
Education Committee, is free and open to the public.
There will be a reception before the start of the program at the completion
of the Divine Liturgy.