THE LOOP — A monumental Chicago painting marking the Armenian genocide of 100 years ago has found a fitting home for a month at the Daley Center.
"Armenia," Jackie Kazarian's 300-square-foot painting inspired by Pablo Picasso's "Guernica," has been mounted in the lobby near the Picasso sculpture at Daley Plaza.
"Armenia Under the Picasso" runs through April 29, with the painting available for viewing weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
"It's exciting for me to have the painting here in the shadow of Picasso's most famous sculpture," Kazarian said Friday.
"Guernica," of course, was Picasso's attempt to capture the horrors of modern warfare as inflicted on a small village in the Spanish Civil War.
The exhibit also includes a series of weekly midday musical performances, beginning at noon Friday with the Lincoln Trio, a chamber ensemble including Desiree Ruhstat on violin, David Cunliffe on cello and Marta Aznavoorian on piano. Armenian singer-songwriter Gor Mkhitarian follows at noon Wednesday, then the Mark Gavoor ensemble playing Armenian folk music April 22 and finally the Bambir, a Joycean Armenian prog-rock band, April 28.
The Logan Square painter's homage to "Guernica" and to the suffering of her own people debuted a year ago in Pilsen and is now on a nationwide tour, returning briefly to Chicago.
"Somebody at the Cultural Center had seen it and said it would be great to bring it to a wider audience," Kazarian said. So she applied to have it mounted in the perfect Chicago spot, the Daley Center near the Picasso, and after being accepted opened the exhibit Monday.
Kazarian has said the work is about the sadness and forgiveness resulting from the World War I-era genocide, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died at the hands of Ottoman Turks. Her grandparents fled the region shortly before World War I to emigrate to the United States, and the painting also finds ways to honor her own family history.
She added that she "didn't want to depict the horror of genocide," but rather intended to celebrate 3,000 years of Armenia culture at the same time.
Still, there was no getting around its reason for being. In the Holocaust, she said, "Hitler was inspired by the fact that the world had forgotten about the Armenian genocide." "Armenia," then, was her attempt to reflect the phrases commonly said about both: "never forget" and "never again."
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