Upstate Artist Collective

Ani Jillian Tashjian Artistic Director of the Upstate Artist Collective over thirty years ago started collaborating with artists and poets bringing their gifts to share in alternative spaces making it accessible to all to view in a carefully chosen space with warmth and ambiance as you will find when welcomed in Ani’s home. Ani’s participation with this process shares and nurtures artists in these alternative spaces bringing art to the public in everyday life.

Art at The Hudson Valley International Festival of the Voice

The International Festival of the Voice

presented an art exhibition, summer 2023
featuring painters Bruce Murphy, Ani Tashjian and Steven Weiss.
With small works exhibition
“Remembrance” April 24, 1915 Armenia
including painters Sarkis Simonian, Iris Tatian, Ani Tashjian and Laura Zarougian
Dance performance by Heidi Stonier and musician Maggie Parent

Hanging the exhibition

Bruce Murphy

Courtesy Carrie Haddad Gallery Hudson, NY,

Texas native, Brue Murphy, will exhibit a new series of paintings using his preferred materials of enamel paint and various metallic powders. Over the years, we have seen Murphy’s abstract color composition take on characteristics of landscapes where horizon lines distinctly separate land from sky in minimalist blocks of color. Recently, Murphy has introduced a grid of straight, measured lines that pierce through the expansive color schemes with the implied specificity of an Agnes Martin. Diaphanous clouds of color are layered within veils of gold and silver metallic powders. A true master of this medium, the artist’s deft application results but also emits from, through and behind the nebula of color. Murphy invents a universe on a two-dimensional plane where his marks and incisions become points in the cosmos. Bruce Murphy obtained a BFA in paintings from the Parson’s School of Design in New York City. After a long career in graphic design, he now lives in Rhinecliff, NY and devotes himself full-time to his art.

Ani Tashjian

“All I ever wanted my paintings to say to the viewer in that given moment of contact is to feel the deepest part of their own sacred heart” Ani

Ani was born into an Armenian family in Marseilles France. Her family came to America when she was very young. She grew up among artists and loved her ethnic Armenian music, delicious foods and loving family, which was the first muse into her passage for the passion of painting. She studied at the High School of Music and Art, and received the Nessa Cohen Award from the Arts Students League in New York to study at The New York Studio School with painter and mentor Nicholas Carone.

Today she is blessed with parenthood to her beautiful daughter and muse Maia Jillian, who is now twenty years old and an opera singer and is married to artist and painter Steven Weiss.

“My paintings are marks like threads connecting our memories, our family and the world.” Ani

Love song

You are the seeds that make my blossoms grow
you are the stream that feeds my inspiration
you are the ocean that rises to the sky
and weeps down love you are my love song

dedicated to my daughter Maia and husband Steven

When visiting Ani and her paintings, poet Robert Bly compared her archetypal women to the women adored in Hafiz’s and Rumi’s love poems.

Steven Weiss

“My work is the process of the removal of veils induced by society; thus allowing the penetration of the essence and origins of the work itself. The paintings begin with no preconceived image or idea; only a profound and persistent emotion, which is the actual beginning. These images and emotions develop and unite to form a synthesis which brings to consciousness that which I was in touch with and which needed to be understood. Having a strong belief that we are more than we know, the process allows me to go beyond the limits of knowledge and to be accessible to that which I am only vehicle.”
Steven Weiss

Small works exhibition “Remembrance”

Small works exhibition “Remembrance”
April 24, 1915 Armenia
with painters Sarkis Simonian, Iris Tatian, Ani Tashjian and Laura Zarougian

On April 24th, 1915, the Armenian writers, musicians, doctors and intellectuals of Istanbul were rounded up by the Ottoman authorities and sent to their deaths.
From 1915-1923, Armenians throughout the provinces were forcibly removed from their indigenous homelands. On the long marches into the desert, women and children perished from starvation and disease. Many of the men were executed in plain sight or sent to labor camps.
The survivors of this genocide fled to all parts of the globe- Latin America, Europe, Asia, North America. In these far off places they established communities, rebuilding what they could of their lost homeland.
Armenians are most proud of their alphabet, their cuisine and their mountains. In almost any Armenian home, you will find a painting of Ararat- the famed twin peaks of the bible where Noah’s ark is said to have landed. These mountains are not technically in Armenia proper- most of historic Armenia is not, but they speak to the very soul of Armenians. We are an ancient people of the mountains. Growers of grapes, figs and apricots. Visit Armenia, and shepherds, taxi drivers, and school children will recite you poems. You will find sculptures of poets and painters all over Armenia.
The genocide receives little attention by the global community. Turkey, to this day, denies that it ever happened. And sadly, this denial has paved the way for more violence against the Armenian people and their right to sovereignty. Today Azerbaijan is waging war on Armenia’s eastern border. And yet, most media sites ignore this reality. Once again, we ask, who writes the history? Who decides what gets written in the textbooks? All too often it is the great empires, colonial powers, the dictators and oil rich nations that can erase their subjects, indigenous communities without any repercussions. The victors choose the narrative.
But on April 24th we remember. We remember our homes, churches, mountains that we left behind. We remember the loved ones we lost. They are still waiting for us to return. Until then we paint what we can remember.
Laura Zarougian April 2023