The Art of Armenia: An Introduction
Christina Maranci
October 4, 2018, at Tufts University
Armenia has a material history and visual culture that reaches back to the Paleo-lithic era. Prof. Christina Maranci’s newly published The Art of Armenia: An Introduction, provides a survey of the arts of Armenia from antiquity to the early modern times. It covers a wide range of media, including architecture, stone sculpture, works in metal, wood, and cloth, manuscript illumination, and ceramic arts, and places Armenian art within broad historical, archeological, and cultural contexts. The Art of Armenia offers students, scholars, and heritage readers of the Armenian community something long desired but never before available: a complete and authoritative introduction to 3000 years of Armenian art, archeology, architecture, and design.
Christina Maranci is Arthur H. Dadian and Ara T. Oztemel Professor of Armenian Art and serves as Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Tufts University, as well as an academic advisor to the Armenian Museum of America and to NAASR. She has published and lectured widely, having authored three previous monographs and over seventy essays, articles, and reviews, including the books Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and Nation (2001) and Vigilant Powers: Three Churches of Early Medieval Armenia (2015). For the latter work in 2016 she received from NAASR the Dr. Sona Aronian Book Prize for Excellence in Armenian Studies. Her work combines scholarship on the history of Armenian art and architecture with advocacy for at-risk Armenian heritage, particularly medieval monuments in the Republic of Turkey.
The program was the first Annual Prof. Charles B. Garabedian Lecture and is sponsored by the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), the Darakjian Jafarian Chair in Armenian History, and the Tufts Armenian Club.