Combining Words, Art and Space to Tell a Story

For the exhibit, he collaborated with the Armenian Museum of America for a five-part exhibition series centering on the work of 12 Armenian artists. The exhibitions examine and celebrate contemporary Armenian art at a particular moment in history, organized to coincide with the centennial memorialization of the 1915 Armenian Genocide.

The first portion of the show was in September 2014. With the centennial in 2015, the gallery saw the most visitors it had ever seen, Bartel said.

Bartel married fellow artist Talin Megherian in 1990. Through her, he was exposed not only to a different artist, but a different culture and a history that came with a lot of cultural pain.

Bartel said that as a teacher, as well as artist, his goal is to communicate what is happening with the work. “I like to see a great variety of works from a small number of artists,” he said.

In the catalog dedicated to artist John Avakian, titled “If I Begin to Cry,” pictures of Avakian’s works are paired with a play by Elliot Baker, titled “The Past Is Not the Past,” about surviving the Armenian Genocide.

Bartel has created top-notch catalogs to go with the exhibit. He printed the play, he said, “so that our students can read it. He is the non-visual artist in this exhibit. I experimented with the show that way, to include Elliot’s work.”

“I wanted it to help bring the hard-hitting truth of genocide to the family level,” Bartel said.

All together, there are seven catalogs.

The Armenian Genocide exhibits, he said, “made me better informed and it humbled me.”

“Digging in as a white male, a gallery director in an affluent country, it is very humbling, very moving. There is so much turmoil, so much angst,” he said. “The Armenian people are holding on to the memory of those they lost. You can’t just dig into them and not be moved. The breadth of what I read was very, very informative.”

Bartel is a collage-based artist. His work assumes assembled forms of painting, drawing and sculpture that examine the roles of landscape and nature in contemporary culture.

He received his bachelor’s degree in painting from Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and also studied in Rome as part of RISD’s European Honors Program between1984-1985. He achieved his MFA in painting from Carnegie Mellon University in 1993.

In 1990, Bartel was a recipient of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship (U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.) and in 2000, he was awarded a Connecticut Council on the Arts Fellowship Grant in support of the continuation of his drawing series, “Garden Studies” and related “Terra Reverentia” series.

Bartel has taught at Harvard University, Brown University, Carnegie Mellon University, Manhattanville College and Bridgeport University. He has been a guest critic at Rhode Island School of Design, Vermont College and New Hampshire Institute of Art and has lectured at Alfred University, Chatham College, Western Connecticut State University, Montclaire State University and The New England Teaching Conference.

Currently, Bartel is working on an exhibit titled “Utopia/Dystopia” as well as one titled “Light and Dark.” Again, he is taking the themes and focusing on different contexts and meanings to bring in more layers.

The exhibits at the CSW Thompson Gallery are open to the public.