New MFA Director Terjanian Brings Vast Experience to Role

When asked how the MFA is reacting under these circumstances, Terjanian said, “The practical implications are that we’re attuned to our environment, so we are, at all times, thinking about the economic circumstances and the general landscape in which we operate, both in terms of audiences and in terms of what the stakeholders are. We are, in that regard, able to maintain our programs [and] our values.”

A lot of museum projects are carried out in partnership over long periods of time, so that much of the MFA’s programming, Terjanian said, is a continuation of commitments made a long time ago. “Perhaps where we’re looking more carefully is what is the scale … of what we present to the public. Do we need to do everything as big as we would like?,” Terjanian said, adding that there is “a question perhaps also of tone.”

Terjanian said that though museums as institutions have their own voice and views, “our chief role is not to use our own voice. Our chief role is to be the impresario for the artists’ voices. And so when we think about our mission, at all times we’re thinking about being a place that brings multiple perspectives. They can be divergent, they can be convergent, but it’s not just our own voice. It’s the voices of the artists.”

Part of what museums do, he said, is to restore complexity, ambiguity and nuance, leaving room for exploration, interpretation and dialogue. In other words, he said, “I think our inherent mission is to continue to ask questions and not always to answer them, and to have the audience participate in defining what the response is. So to the degree that asking questions can be seen as disruptive or controversial, then maybe we’re disruptors. But I think we have to remind ourselves what authority we have to answer these questions. And sometimes questions are more interesting than the answers.”

If museums can be called progressive, Terjanian said, it is in the sense of revisiting familiar subjects through new lenses. He said, “I wouldn’t say that in that sense that we are leaning to any particular position, but we don’t want to repeat what has already been said.”

He gave as an example the Rachel Ruysch exhibition ongoing at the MFA. She is a Dutch woman painter of the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. “It could have been couched as a project that is first and foremost about a woman artist, but it’s not. It’s a show about a great artist whose gender is a woman. And this is part of the story, but it’s not front and center. Front and center are the unique things that she brought to her art…This is an example where, in my view, we’re trying to provide a broader spectrum for looking at her art and her career.”

He noted another duality in general in the role of museums, stating: “I’m very interested in knowing whether the museum can be both a place for engagement with the issues of our time, and at the same time also be a place that relieves you from the world – where you can find a bit of contemplation, a bit of regeneration. And I don’t know that we’ve been quite intentional about the seasonality of what we offer and how we can ensure that at all times, the museum is also a place where you can remove yourself for a moment from the day-to-day and from the news, and you can regenerate.”

International Relations and Provenance

Some of the changes in international relations that have taken place under the current US administration might have implications for the MFA. Terjanian said that there has been a decline in international tourism by 10 percent in the museum’s 2025 fiscal year, though it is hard to attribute precise causes to this.

On the other hand, he said that there has been a surge of interest in international partnerships with the MFA by foreign or international museums. Terjanian said, “In my view, museums at all times are designed to build bridges. So we build bridges with our communities, we build bridges with other museums in the nation, but we also build bridges internationally. … The danger of the time is to forego the opportunities that we have to be part of a larger conversation than the national one.”

Another issue which is in part international is that efforts by various nations or ethnic groups to claim items held by museums have increased in recent years. Terjanian said, “Historically, we’ve been committed to reviewing all claims that are submitted to the museum and to proactively review the collection as well, identifying potential issues with a missing gap in the history of the object, or something else – red flags. And we were one of the first museums in the country to have a Department of Provenance that would specifically address those questions. It’s actually a responsibility for the entire institution to consider those things that started with Holocaust-era restitution, and it’s expanded to other areas.”

A number of factors come into play in such an investigation that also might concern Greek, Armenian or Urartian items in museums. Terjanian said, “The first thing I would say is that when we examine the claim of something that would be unlawfully exported or unlawfully removed, we’re looking at the land, at the region, and at the state that is the sovereign state of the space at this time. In many cases, when it comes to archaeological items, the find spots are not known. So not all Greek objects are to be found in Greece. A lot of them travel. And so, in the absence of a find spot, it’s very hard for us to engage in a meaningful review of a claim and a restitution.”

On the other hand, the MFA did return a number of items to Turkey that were created prior to the arrival of “Turks” to the region. Terjanian explained that in these instances, “you can trace the objects directly back to the soil to a specific era, in this instance, [in] Turkey. And therefore, yes, even if they were made before the land became Turkey, this is the sovereign state today over those lands, and that’s who we engage in conversation with.”

Labelling such items can also be complicated. Terjanian said, “This debate continues. You have a Ukrainian artist who has spent most of her career in Russia. So is her art Russian, or is it Ukrainian?”

Furthermore, some institutions have moved away from giving a nationality to the objects and just give the place of birth and death of the artist. That is easier when artists are well-documented or still living. However, ancient objects usually are unassigned to a specific creator, said Terjanian, and then may have traveled a lot between the time they were made and the place where they were found (assuming that the latter is known). Instead, historical designations are assigned.

Terjanian said that today, Alsace, where he grew up, is considered French, but an artwork made there in the 15^th century would not have been considered French so that labelling it as such would have been wrong.

If there is an Urartian object, for example, Terjanian said it would not be called Armenian because, though very contiguous with historical Armenia, the latter was from a later historical stage. He said, “We tried to go to the historical names rather than the modern state names” and go from the larger units to the smaller ones. For that reason, the Urartian object would probably be labelled as Eastern Anatolian first, and then Urartu would come second.

A carpet created in medieval times bearing an Armenian inscription in the territory that might be called Eastern Anatolia today would first be cited with its location, such as a Turkoman principality, and then, due to the inscription, be ascribed to Armenian culture, Terjanian said. He gave a second example of an Armenian swordsmith or metalworker working in St. Petersburg in the 19^th century. The latter would create an object which would be made in Russian but considered Armenian too.

Armenian Items at MFA, Including Terjanian

When you search on the MFA website, 69 items show up under Armenian and 28 items under Armenia, with the latter mostly duplicates of the former.

When asked how complete these lists were, he replied that as a former curator, he could state that cataloging is a never-ending job. Some of the information online was taken from card catalogs compiled decades ago. There are half a million objects in the collection of the MFA and a limited staff only reviews such listings usually when working on a project concerning a particular cluster of objects. Therefore, the database reflects an imperfect and always changing state of knowledge and is not comprehensive.

There is the question of designation, as to whether an object had been categorized as Armenian, and the consistency of it. At times, for example, the photographer Yousuf Karsh may have been labelled as Armenian, and at times not.

Then there is the matter of expertise needed, meaning, he continued: “If you don’t have an inscription on the object, and you do not know where it was found, you sometimes need another colleague who’s visiting, who said, but there is one that has an Armenian inscription in this other place. And then you realize you have the presence of an Armenian object.”

Asked to highlight what items might be considered as particularly significant in the MFA collection connected to Armenians, Terjanian mentioned the large important body of photographs hosted in the MFA’s Karsh archives, a hanging textile (altar curtain), which he called “a very glorious piece of textile,” some Urartian material “not found everywhere,” and some carpets.

Terjanian related about his own Armenian ancestry that he does not have much information. His paternal grandfather Bedros Terjanian, born in Gesaria or Kayseri, immigrated to France in the early 1920s after the Genocide with a cousin as young boys. They made the decision to assimilate.

He said, “I have an awareness of this heritage, but I don’t have a lot of substance that came with that heritage. So because of the awareness, I’ve read about Armenian history. I’m always intrigued, but I have not been exposed to it as much as I would like.”

“I recently bought a photograph of a semi-destroyed Armenian church that is in my living room, which is sort of a marker of my identity,” Terjanian noted. “But I’ve never seen it in the flesh, this great religious architecture.”

He said he has the ambition to go and visit Armenia one day, as one of his sisters has done, but he planned to do it during his vacation time, which with his new position at present is limited. He said, “I believe in exposure, so if I were to go to Armenia, it would be transformative.” His two children, in their early 20s, are aware, he said, that their surname often invites curiosity and discussion, so he has encouraged them to educate themselves and read about the history of Armenia and its contributions.

Career Choices and Achievements

In an interview earlier this year, Terjanian had mentioned that his first early contact with art was his exposure to Persian carpets when he worked in the summers for his father, but he ended up going to law school and then getting a business degree. When reminded of this, he said, “All those things are true…. It was only over time that I realized that there were possibilities beyond what had been familiar to me. In my environment, I did not imagine it was possible to work in a museum. It had never occurred to me.”

In a 2013 interview conducted by Florence Avakian, Terjanian related that his attraction to art studies began when he was studying law in France and bought some woodcuts showing people in 17^th century costumes, including armor, as decorations. He was curious and could not find serious scholarly books on armor, leading him to do some research on his own. He went on to get a graduate degree in history at the University of Metz and then did further history coursework at the University of California, Berkeley.

He said to the Mirror-Spectator: “I felt that as a lawyer or somebody with a business degree, I could make a contribution, but I didn’t know how unique it would be. And when I saw an opening in the arts in a field that is understudied, I actually felt that I could really make a dent. I could have an impact.”

So he pursued this and learned what it is like to be a curator, starting in 1997 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Before coming to Boston, he worked for more than a decade at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as the Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Curator in Charge of Arms and Armor.

If he had to choose his most significant achievements, he said he would have to cite two things: “One of them, in my view, has been to expand an audience for what seems to be, at first sight, a niche area of arts.” As a curator of arms and armor for some time, he found various topics that could speak to different people. He suggested that “It could be about the technology. It could be about the relation of armor and fashion, or it could be about history of diplomacy and exchanges of lavish gifts, which often include weapons, or it is about trophies and memories and time capsules like churches or temples decorated with things taken from the enemy…and of course, all the decorative arts, different styles and movements, and the fact that some of these things were prized above what we consider art today.”

Terjanian gave the example of Philip II, king of Spain, writing in his last will and testament that tapestries and armor were the most important things that belonged to the crown of Spain, not paintings, and these could not be sold or dispersed. This indicated a different hierarchy of values than what exists today, and Terjanian said, “part of my work was always to restore what people view in their own times about those things in which I am interested.”

The second achievement is that, Terjanian said, “for a very long time, I thought my job was to restore the credit to artists that were once known and have become anonymous… I’ve always found that very fulfilling – to pull people out of obscurity and bring back their name.”

He gave as one example a recent MFA exhibition of the drawings of landscape artist Hyman Bloom (1913-2009), whose fame had faded over time.

AI and a Question for Readers

It seems as if all aspects of life are being affected by the advances in artificial intelligence. As far as its role in museums, Terjanian said, “It’s too early to say. It’s clear enough that it can help us to be an efficient organization, like any organization and then there are art historical specific things that AI can help us do. But I think in terms, particularly, of combing data, identifying patterns, and then raising questions about how to harmonize them, this needs to be done manually, where you have to review everything for consistency.”

For assigning fields in the cataloging of items for things like region and state, AI could fill in gaps that would improve searchability, Terjanian said, and AI is also pretty good now at reading iconography. Traditionally people would describe the contents of a work, like a tree, a house, or a horse in the picture, but now AI can do this and improve the searchability of a museum collection.

Terjanian posed a question for readers of the Mirror-Spectator: “It would be of interest to me to know how this museum can be a museum for the Armenian community of greater Boston. There’s obviously an Armenian museum. One museum is never enough, right?” He pointed out that the MFA’s vastness may make its specific materials more diluted, but on the other hand, it might be able to tell stories differently, through its different kinds of collections.

So Terjanian said that it would be very interesting to know what the MFA could do to create mutual engagement and, he said, “I think that has to come from the community.”

For more on the museum itself, see mfa.org.