Varteni Mosdichian
Varteni Mosdichian is a Boston-based Armenian American artist.
Early life
Varteni Mosdichian was born in 1953 in Istanbul to the Armenian family of Manouk Mosdichian and Zepur Elmayan. Her grantparents’ roots go back to Kayseri in Central Anatolia and Bafra. She was educated at the Sourp Mesrobyan School, later at the Austrian Saint George Gymnasium. At age 16 she came to Boston, Massachusetts, where she attended Lynn Classical High School and gained an early acceptance to California Institute of Arts. In 1979 she graduated from the College of Fine Arts, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL.During the 1980s she taught Art and Armenian language at Armenian General Benevolent Union School in Watertown, MA. Varteni's biography is listed in the 1999 Who's Who of American Women.
She was married to Canadian-Armenian conductor Nurhan Arman.
Works
In most of Varteni's works Armenian themes play a major, but not overriding role. Some works, such as "Towards Embracing" are explicitly Armenian and use concrete symbolism. Other works are more subtly Armenian, and hold many different possibilities in store. The work "Peasants against the Wind" shows kneeling peasants who are bowed but not humiliated, steadfastly holding their own against the elements swirling around them.Varteni's colors, visions, moments of remembrance and dream-like, almost unreal figures, almost invisible, merged in the texture of colors and patches of shadows and light embrace beauty and creative forces inherent in humankind, this by a woman whose personal history is full of deportation and exile, massacres and plunder suffered by her grandparents.
Exhibitions
Varteni's works have been exhibited in multitude of galleries and in various parts of the world including "Patriot Place" Foxboro, MA, l’Atelier varteni, Boston, MA, l’Atelier Z Centre Culturel Christiane Peugeot, Paris, France, Fine Art Gallery, Detroit, MI, ACEC, Watertown, MA, Armenian Library and Museum of America, Watertown, MA and in Cambridge, New York City, Istanbul, Germany, France and many other places. In her "Palimpsest, History In Drawers" exhibition held in Istanbul, Turkey, Varteni connects the internal and external worlds of day-to-day life, she scrapes away the solitude and alienation of the human condition giving the observer/participant a totally lived life, whereupon the palimpsest rejuvenates in continuum.Her works can be found at the Museum of Modern Arts, Yerevan, Armenia, College of Fine Arts, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL and several private collections.