FRESNO — The Armenian Museum of Fresno is hosting a dual exhibition, “Fresno Armenians: 50 Years Ago,” by Robby Antoyan, along with the sound installation, “From the Fields of Fresno” by Joseph Bohigian. The exhibition opened on Wednesday, June 25, and runs through August 27.
The museum is located in the University of California Center at 550 E. Shaw Avenue in Fresno, across from Fashion Fair mall. It is open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and admission is free. “Fresno Armenians: 50 Years Ago,” features over 300 captivating photographs by Antoyan, taken at Armenian picnics and other community gatherings in Fresno during the 1970s. These rare and intimate images document the vibrant social life, traditions, and enduring spirit of Fresno’s Armenian American community.
“From the Fields of Fresno” is a tribute to those generations who established a new home in Fresno and blends Armenian folk music with an oral history of an Armenian Genocide survivor, Bohigian’s beloved great-grandmother, Seranouch Tavookjian. It takes as its sources the sounds of Armenian Fresno: recordings made as part of the Works Progress Administration’s California Folk Music Project in 1939 by the American ethnomusicologist Sidney Robertson Cowell, and a 1984 recording of the artist’s great-grandmother recounting her journey to America. These recordings illustrate the sounds and stories of the community in its earliest decades; a combination of the music they brought with them from the homeland and the influence of their new American home.
“This pairing of photography and sound, representing the artistry of two generations. The exhibit invites visitors to experience Fresno’s Armenian past in deeply emotional and sensory ways,” said Varoujan Der Simonian, director of the Armenian Museum of Fresno. This exhibition has been made possible, in part, by funding from the City of Fresno Measure P, Expanded Access to Arts and Culture, administered by the Fresno Arts Council.
Antoyan is a licensed architect in California. He is a certified member of the National Council of Architectural Registration Board and the National Council of Interior Designers. Prior to the firm’s establishment, Antoyan worked with prominent architecture firms, gaining the knowledge and expertise necessary to manage his firm efficiently. Antoyan is a Fresno native whose upbringing was deeply influenced by the rich cultural fabric of the local Armenian community. As an amateur photographer, he spent the 1970s capturing hundreds of unforgettable moments at Armenian Church picnics and community events. Like many of his Armenian peers, Antoyan grew up surrounded by those who had relocated to Fresno following the Armenian Genocide of 1915, as well as later waves of immigration from Russia in the 1940s and 1950s, and from the Middle East in the 1970s. These older generations of Armenians carried themselves with a quiet authenticity — never trying to be anything other than who they were — and that left a lasting impression on him. After his first year away at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where he received his degree in Architecture, Antoyan returned home and began photographing this generation. An amateur with a newly purchased Minolta SRT101 and manual focus lens, he set out to document Armenians aged 60 and up, capturing them at church picnics, family gatherings, and everyday moments. His photos offer a candid, heartfelt portrait of a resilient community and a generation shaped by memory, migration, and cultural pride.
Bohigian is a composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music. His work focuses on issues of memory, cultural reunification, and diaspora. With a strong interest in reestablishing a relationship with lost elements of our past to better envision our future, he makes use of archival materials in his music, such as sound recordings, interviews, and written texts, synthesizing fragments of song lyrics and reviving ancient musical notations. Bohigian’s music has been performed at the International Computer Music Conference (Limerick, Ireland), Walt Disney Concert Hall (Los Angeles), TENOR Conference (Melbourne), Suoni Per Il Popolo (Montreal), New Music Gathering, and Aram Khachaturian Museum Hall (Yerevan) by the Mivos Quartet, Decibel, Great Noise Ensemble, Argus Quartet, and Playground Ensemble. He performs as a founding member of Ensemble Decipher, a group dedicated to working with vintage, contemporary, and emerging technologies, and produces broadcasts of contemporary music for Music from Other Minds on KALW in San Francisco and interviews with composers on the Other Minds Podcast and the music/technology-focused series Decipher This!. Bohigian holds a PhD and MA degrees in composition from Stony Brook University, and a BA degree from California State University, Fresno.
