“The Armenian Genocide" at URI Feinstein

From our review of “The Armenian Genocide: 95 Years Later, In Remembrance” at the University of Rhode Island’s Feinstein Providence Campus:

In April 1915, Turks of the Ottoman Empire began killing the Armenians in their midst. Soldiers rounded up hundreds of Armenian clergy, intellectuals, and members of parliament. Many were shot. Other Armenians were “deported” — forced to march or packed into trains, without food or shelter, across mountains and desert to concentration camps. The empire was crumbling and Turks apparently feared the growing strength and nationalism of the Armenian community.

News reports told of torture; crucifixions; rapes; a thousand men, women and children burned to death inside a locked building; dozens of Armenians tied together and thrown into a lake to drown. To this day Turkey does not acknowledge the extent of the killing, but some 1.5 million Armenians perished.

Berge Ara Zobian, owner of Gallery Z in Providence, has assembled works by more than 40 artists in “The Armenian Genocide: 95 Years Later, In Remembrance,” at the University of Rhode Island’s Feinstein Providence Campus (80 Washington Street, through April 30). It’s an important subject, deserving serious attention, but the art is disappointingly amateurish, ranging from overwrought goth to cutesy folk to late Cubism.

Read the rest here.

“The Armenian Genocide: 95 Years Later, In Remembrance,” at the University of Rhode Island’s Feinstein Providence Campus, 80 Washington Street, Providence, April 1 to 30, 2010.

Pictured from top to bottom: Kevork Mourad’s painting from the series "Fireflies Over the Euphrates" and Stephen Koharian's painting "Turkishness 2."