the collection is curator and tour guide and jennifer liston munson executive director of the museum thank you so much for joining us today thank you for having us well it's a delight and i have been to the museum many times i have taken family and friends there and i expect that i will go there again many times but today i'd like to share this gem of a museum with all of you so starting with history can you tell me when the museum was founded and what were the goals of the pounders well it's kind of funny the museum was actually founded in belmont neighbor library out of the name so so it's called the armenian museum because that is the dominant aspect of the institution now we saw the library but the museum is the main thing here and how long ago was that of his one nine hundred seventy a basement converted into a museum isolation and so then that became the i mean a busy i'm we've moved out after four years moving to watertown which point the poet music school then moved into the same the folklore debts the floor plan of a church because that's the one art object that a person would say which when he goes to church he sees the building itself and so they could put the building design of it into it i don't know if it's actually true or not but that's the story that's told about that on at the museum of fine arts and the other places we have a number of objects in the collection that tell the story of the armenians or well the also the story these objects tell specifically incidents of the genocide church of a different copy the different book of the bible you tried a back and forth like baseball cards if you wanted to see complete set you had to go to the monastery because a monastery would have the complete set and that's what they used to copy new copies from the old copy down all by hand and so these were done in armenia and actually the traditions continued on media quite wait up until the nineteenth century they were still producing these in the in europe to put the whole tradition of illumination said died out in the you came to the i mean you see him after fifteen years as one of the heads had designers at the museum of fine arts in boston what with this new adventure well i had  been as you mentioned part of a senior member of the design department at the museum of fine arts and renovated many galleries and did many special exhibitions many that you would have seen photographs he was armenian and he was a very famous iconic portrait photographer of the twentieth century and she wanted to donate a collection to the museum on the stipulation that i and my colleague  process of reinvigorating the museum in a new way and the armenian museum yep so those galleries are gallery renovations and and then a few years later i was invited back by michelle collegian who is the president of the board of trustees and she invited me to do a show of metalwork the acquire the beating collection of metal ware and so i did a show then and she began to ask me if i would think about becoming the executive director there but i was very happy at the m f a and kept kept doing both things and then most recently i redid their brand identity where we developed an icon a logo and a tagline to represent the museum we chose a symbol of the symbol of eternity which is a very common symbol and armenian art and culture and we chose a very distinct symbol that's carved in the side of a twelve century monastery and so the symbol that you'll see if you come by the museum is a sort of circular motif that has no beginning and no end and we adopted the tag line art culture eternity for the museum so after that process and the more i got involved in the building in the museum and the more the shell wanted me to think about it i had just finished the greek galleries with my colleagues at the f a and i just thought it might be a nice time to take a take a risk and do something new and change and i felt that  i think that the museum has an amazing collection i think our museum culture is fascinating as this plays in between the sort of hellenistic greek world and the ancient persian world and how it's developed as a kind of arbiter between art and culture along the silk road through time and it's a very interesting place now and so i and the building itself is actually yeah i was i was wondering how the architectural legacy was going to imperf you know affect your efforts there and everything because it it i important yes part of it and but do you feel as though the the the things that you're doing with the  post world war two the idea with brutal ism was to create a sense of strength and and durrance and as it turns out with armenian history it becomes a very interesting metaphor for as a backdrop for the difficult history of armenia and within that it creates a space to show  colorful lively and inventive artwork so i think the two things actually work very well together that we can sort of conjure up the idea of armenia through this stone  armenia is known as a country of stone obsidian of different rock formations and the stone churches and we can use that as a kind of metaphor  house the collection the challenge to invite people not only to the interiors to also address the exteriors which has been a little for learn over time and so we're looking at ways we're really studying original drawings with architect virginia to rudy who lives in lexington and is from argentina and she specializes in museum architecture and also brutal ism and so she's  been a wonderful colleague to work on this project together we've just finished a model of the building that will be in my office i would say this week and it will be a way for us to design talk with people show people and sort of engage with others to help us get to the next stage very good you know as i said before i have been to the museum many times and one of the times that i was there i happened to be in this one room small room that was dedicated to the genocide and i mean it was such a heartbreaking thing to happen to the to the people that i left there in tears but you know it's over the many many times that i've been there now i see this museum as an absolute monument to the survival of the people and their history and their culture and i think that's just such a wonderful thing and you know all the different  exhibitions that you have there i mean i there just so many you know that i can go there and spend hours and  studio and she had all a lot of different bodies of work but the one that i started to resonated with me was this work that had to do with her sharing her grandmother's bedroom as a little girl and her grandmother had experienced the death march and the genocide and survived and came into this country and she didn't talk about her experience very much with marcia but somehow by sharing the bedroom there was this transference of trauma nonverbal transference of trauma and i think that many families in different cultures have experienced that yes where a family member doesn't verbal tell the stories but there's an understanding of the deep loss and a very sad history and so when marsha died the paper with the  allowed the kind of irregularities and and almost bruises to come to the surface of the paper and she used that as a kind of oracle for her drawing on the surface so that idea of the nonverbal transference of trout trama for instance is a very interesting one for me to pursue in different ways so in terms of having a contemporary program that we invite artists to talk about those kinds of things as well as other things that are important to armenian armenian americans armenians from armenia or people who also have shared experiences i think will be a very interesting program for us oh yes  and speaking of those other programs i see that you have some programs going on all the time just you know seem to including programs for children and and as well as for dolls and i think that's just such a wonderful thing to do and they get to discover their personal history as an army and when they do this or if they're not armenian they get to know more about it which is a good thing yes and i think that's the advantage of having classes in the museum is to not be shut away in a classroom but to actually enter into the galleries and to use the objects in the collection as a way to talk about interesting and important unique qualities of remey and culture because that's what we're trying to do is to really show what is unique and special and profound about an enduring culture and so i i think that when by inviting children in they really find out that this is their place to whether they're armenian or non armenian and that they get inspired to make work from what they see in the galleries and we have a wonderful artist in residence our vic and she is teaching them and you're going through these reservations and can you tell me more about what your goals of the gallery renovation are yes we are doing we are doing two things on one level we have as i mentioned the full scale model of the building thinking in a macro way about the entire building the outside the inside and how it can work it is a full museum  in the interim we are doing a first gallery which we have just gotten approval on and we will begin constructing this summer which is an introduction to the collection and it  on the major themes that we can tell through our collection so it's not trying to talk about all of armenia but it's trying to talk about what we can say through the objects that we have in our collection as being here in watertown being here in the united states so we have some of the objects that you saw earlier we start with iranian objects to ancient objects and what those are about and how they are the early beginnings of what is armenian art and culture and then we move to the early invention of the language of an alphabet and a unique indo european language and how that contributes to culture and then we move to the early adoption of christianity which is related to language because it's through the translation of the local tax red is and has been since ancient times to world culture and then we talk about could tie a ceramics and how it's different from other suresh but it's also it contains elements from china and from the middle east from persia and from europe and that is part of the silk road tradition and we show people how these motifs and these methods are exchanged back and forth through the continent through armenia and we do talk about the genocide and about that incredible loss and devastation and that we don't end there we go on to the next case which is armenians in america and we try to tell stories about those families who came lost everything and rebuilt  and persevered and formed communities and became part of the fabric of united states so that's setting the tone for the entire building so all of those things will be explored and expanded  upon more greatly in other areas other galleries of the museum so we also have the car photography exhibition up and we do have the highlights gallery and we have an merchants area so we do have different areas as well as you mentioned the genocide display which we will expand upon and we will make a very prominent part of the museum as well yes so over the years the museum has served as a space for exhibitions and programming as it does now and has been a hub for armenian americans in the community what do you envision as the future of the community engagement at the museum  local volunteers having a bigger role than perhaps they do now war that would be wonderful the challenge is to appeal to our range in the community of armenians and non armenians so we have programs right now that some of the musical programs are tend to really appeal to a more traditional musically usually an older  audience that really appreciates that connection to the past and so that's lovely as well as we just did a collage a night where we were inspired by modernist collages were made in the same time the building was built and so we had a younger group there and we were happy to connect with some people from the a g b u in the sort of young professional crowd we have the programs for children we are constantly thinking of other forms some music we would like to expand to other types of music some jazz and that kind of thing and maybe hear music as you see the objects so to connect different forms we have an oral histories project and so we have a lot of different plans for a full spectrum of visitors excellent well i thank you both so much for coming today this is this is very special to me because i really enjoy that museum so much and however many times you go there there's always something new and wonderful that we haven't seen before so join us again this is the museum and our thank you to all of you also for joining us today and stay tuned to what's going on or or coming this is lucy of again and again and again thank you thank you i think thank you very much