“Arshile Gorky: Community and Connections,” exhibition at the Armenian Museum of America, Watertown, Massachussets
Arshile Gorky: Redrawing Community and Connections December 12, 2025 — April 26, 2026.
“As the first Armenian museum to host an exhibition of Arshile Gorky’s work, we are honored to share this remarkable collection with our members and visitors to the Museum,” commented Michele M. Kolligian, President of the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown, MA.
Arshile Gorky (c. 1904–1948) played a pivotal role in shaping modern art in America. A self-taught painter, his work helped usher in Abstract Expressionism, the first internationally recognized American art movement, and a lasting influence on artists worldwide. This exhibition focuses on Gorky’s relationships and sense of community, from his humble beginnings in Watertown as Vostanik Manoug Adoian to his later life as a celebrated artist.
Art was his way to connect, to rebuild after loss, and to create belonging in the wake of exile and the unacknowledged trauma of the Armenian Genocide. Through works shared by family, fellow artists, and members of the Armenian Diaspora, the exhibition reveals how connection shaped Gorky’s art and identity. His paintings, rooted in memory and renewal, show how he redrew what it meant to be an artist in America—by creating not only compositions, but community.
Biography of the artist
Arshile Gorky (Vostanik Manoug Adoian, 1904–1948) was born in Khorkom, Van (present-day Turkey). Fleeing the genocide that claimed the life of his mother, he immigrated to the United States as a teenage refugee in 1920. After four years with relatives in Watertown, Massachusetts, Gorky moved to New York City and changed his name in honor of the celebrated Russian poet. Refusing all categories, whether artistic or political, as necessarily reductive, Gorky forsook assimilation in favor of celebrating his otherness, becoming a central figure of the cultural milieu of a city on the brink of Modernism. After a decade of working in New York, where he achieved a prominent position as a leading artist, Gorky initiated a series of studies and paintings observed from nature while on holiday in Connecticut, first, and then over two summers at a farm in Virginia. Frequently returning to fragmentary and idealized elements of his early life, Gorky incorporated memories from his childhood as well as his adult fears and desires, among the realities of his surroundings.
The exhibition is curated by Kim S. Theriault, PhD.