Charlie Hachadourian Memorial Fund

Charlie G. Hachadourian, born on July 11, 1954, in the Bronx, New York, was a ground-breaking and brilliantly inventive Armenian-American conceptual artist, curator, arts community builder and gallery owner. His work spans nearly 30 years—in Armenia and the US—and stands alongside the great works of the Land Art movement. His recent untimely passing has motivated us—his family, friends, colleagues and the arts community— to publish a book about his creative work and life, to bring the depth and breadth of his ideas and artworks to a broader audience. This monograph is critical in drawing attention to Charlie's creative work and his dedication to building a socially conscious global arts community.

Currently titled “Charlie Hachadourian: (H)earth,” the book will be in four colors, 60-80 pages with dozens of photos. It will include interviews with Charlie, curatorial statements, essays about his work, biography, photographs, and descriptions of his projects and artwork spanning his lifetime. This book and associated planned exhibitions are critically essential for us to recognize and appreciate Charlie’s legacy as an artist, curator, and arts community builder.

We will donate copies of the book to art libraries of teaching institutions in the US and Armenia.

Won’t you join us to make Charlie Hachadourian: (H)earth a reality?

About Charlie

“I dig holes and move earth,” Charlie half-jokingly said whenever asked about his art.

A humble, approachable, unpretentious human being with a kind heart and an unparalleled sharpness of mind, Charlie lived and breathed art in his lifelong quest for truth and knowing. He invented not only a novel technique in using earth as material for making art, but he developed a truly unique approach to exploring the depths of an artist’s relationship to site, location, space, and time.

“His every visit to Armenia, as to any other place in the world, was a creative and highly personal ‘pilgrimage,’ stemming from the urge to seek and find the truth in life and art.” (L. Sargsian, 2021.)

His most recent work, Topographies, constitutes a series of inverted vessels—reliquaries that transport sacred soil. Earth, to him, was more than dead matter; it was a living, breathing entity that holds memories and carries epigenetic code.

Charlie also created and organized myriad performative projects that focused on creating community through a shared experience, such as breaking bread around a table in a gallery setting and building a tonir (an underground clay oven) in which a traditional lavash bread was baked.

During his performances, strangers became participants around a "hearth," engrossed in conversations related or not related to art, faces aglow in the warmth of a fire or the sun, spirits anointed with the aroma of burning wood, earthy flavors of herbs, a misty breeze on a balmy evening...

Whether creative or re-creative, Charlie’s art humbly centers “displaced” human souls, reminding us of the eternal coexistence of good and evil, dark and light, of our connection to the earth and the divine.

It is the “hearth” of humanity.

Never expecting praise or recognition for his work, Charlie devoted a significant part of his professional life to the cultivation and propagation of modern Armenian art in the years immediately following the collapse of the USSR. He generously shared his professional skills, knowledge, beliefs, and wisdom with everyone in his professional and personal circles through the exhibitions he curated, the catalogs he published and the conversations and interviews he facilitated. The Charlie Khachadourian Gallery, symbolically located adjacent to the Natural History Museum of Armenia, became the first commercial art establishment for local avant-garde artists in the early 1990s in Yerevan. Here, the first ever in the history of Armenian art, an all-women art exhibit opened.

His life in the earthly realm expired on November 4, 2022. His long-term deteriorating health eventually got the best of Charlie, leaving many projects and dreams unrealized.

Charlie will embark on one last pilgrimage this summer to his final resting place in Lake Sevan, Armenia.