Preserving Memories Through Art: A Conversation With Ava Bagdasarian

What is the importance of a name?

The more literary inclined might think of John Proctor in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” as he wrestles between an untrue confession and the preservation of his dignity. For Ava Bagdasarian, the lesson is more personal.

To her, a name is a series of three small prints, each of a wedding photo. The first depicts Bagdasarian’s Armenian great-grandparents, the second her grandparents and the third her parents. 

She chewed on her last name for a moment. Bagdasarian.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to keep that name going,” she said. “But there were a lot of families who had their name swept away because of the genocide. These three weddings, and the passing down of this name generationally, it’s one of the projects that holds the most meaning to me.”

Bagdasarian spent her junior year of high school at a boarding school in Michigan studying visual arts. Her thesis centered around the meaning of her Armenian heritage and the impact of genocide.

“Not many people are aware of the Armenian genocide,” said Bagdasarian, “or really of Armenia in general.”

So in addition to preserving her personal heritage, part of Bagdasarian’s purpose in her art is to educate those who care to take a look. 

During World War I, the Turkish government conducted the systematic killing and deportation of Armenians, resulting in the deaths of between 600,000 and 1.5 million people. To this day, the Turkish government still has not recognized these events as genocide.

Bagdasarian’s relationship with art began at an early age. Born and raised in northern Virginia with her older brother, she remembers growing up playing instruments and going to art camps.

“I have a distinct memory of building instruments out of cardboard boxes,” she remembered fondly. “I’ve always gravitated towards random creative projects.”

Now a sophomore at American University, Bagdasarian is studying Communications and Creative Writing. She had originally planned to apply exclusively to art schools, but her year of boarding school left her feeling a little “burnt out.”

That’s not to say that Bagdasarian hasn’t continued her artistic endeavors. She took a drawing course at American, her first since boarding school. She cited projects from that course as forcing her to expand and get out of her comfort zone, which was a feat certainly achieved by one particular large-scale pencil drawing of Stevie Nicks, the moon, a cat and a huge rose hat, just to name a few, all based on a digital collage.

Bagdasarian’s dive into larger-scale drawings occurred just within the past year, but the theme of family has stayed consistent. She prefers to work with subjects that are close to her. “It’s more intimate,” she said, “I have more emotional knowledge about it.”

Bagdasarian’s process involves finding a family photo, usually of when she or her brother were young, and converting it to black and white to get the proper value systems. She creates a grid system to convert the photo into a proportional, larger scale when she sketches. She tends to start with a face but jumps around to different areas of the image throughout the process to avoid spending too much time in one place.

One of Bagdasarian’s recent projects, a gift for her dad titled “fatherhood,” is a charcoal drawing of herself as a baby taking a nap across his shoulder. Following that, she is currently working on a piece of herself sitting with her grandfather who passed away when she was eight years old. Although not every moment of the process, which can exceed 15 hours, is enjoyable, Bagdasarian finds meaning in the opportunity to create new memories in the midst of preserving old ones.

The scope of Bagdasarian’s artistic pursuits is broad, with photography being a field she is interested in pursuing further. She photographed dancers and musicians at various performances while at boarding school but truly got into photojournalism by attending protests and photographing events as a form of activism.

“I want to use this passion to shine light on issues that people might not know about,” she said. She hopes to explore methods of incorporating visual, fine arts into photojournalism in a way that could potentially be a career.

Above all, Bagdasarian’s art is for her family, her heritage and the greater good. 

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• Ava Bagdasarian
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