Video: From the Fields of Fresno at the Armenian Museum of Fresno, June 25, 2025

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4-Channel Sound Installation​

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Premiere: June 25, 2025 - Armenian Museum of Fresno, Fresno, CA

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Notes:

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The first of my family members to arrive in Fresno, California was my great-grandfather Garabed Tavookjian (b. 1890, Tokat). He came to Fresno in the mid-1910s, a few decades after the first Armenians settled there in 1881. My great-grandmother Seranouch, a survivor of the genocide born in 1906 near Tokat, arrived in Fresno on Easter Sunday, April 12, 1925, as Garabed's wife. Seranouch, who died in 1998 at the age of 92, was my only living connection to my family’s presence in Armenia. However, growing up in Fresno, I was surrounded by a century-old Armenian community that afforded me a familiarity with a culture I was several generations removed from. This installation is a tribute to those generations who established a new home for Armenians in Fresno. 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, 78 RPM records owned by my grandfather Martin Bohigian Sr., and a 1984 recording of my great-grandmother Seranouch 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.