Lusine Saakyan Reclaiming Armenian Identity Through Petroglyphs and Textiles. 

When Lusine Saakyan arrived in America at age twelve, she carried Armenia with her in language, thought, and family bonds yet the history and culture that gave those things meaning remained largely a mystery. She spoke Armenian, lived Armenian, thought Armenian, but did not know her history. Three decades later, standing in her studio surrounded by paintings that bridge ancient petroglyphs and traditional rugs, she has become a keeper of what she almost lost: a living connection to her ancestors and the visual languages they left behind.

Her journey from Yerevan to the American diaspora, from therapeutic painting to scholarly research on ancient Armenian highlands, traces a path that many displaced people know intimately the search for belonging in two places simultaneously, and the eventual discovery that wholeness might come not from choosing between them, but from weaving them together.

Lusine’s family moved to the United States in 1991, just as Armenia was gaining independence from the Soviet Union. The timing was paradoxical: her homeland was finding its voice precisely as she was learning to speak in another. The displacement was not violent or sudden there was no war forcing them out, no refugee camp yet it was displacement nonetheless. Her family and relatives became her safety net, the people who kept her tethered to something recognizable while everything else shifted.

“I had to adapt and fit in,” she recalls. “Meanwhile my family and relatives were my safety and security.”

For decades, this arrangement held. She built a career in child development and education, raised a family, moved through American life with competence and purpose. Yet something remained unsettled, a cultural knowledge gap that achievement and adaptation could not fill. She was Armenian in practice but not in understanding performing identity without fully owning its history.

It would take a crisis to crack open the work of reclamation.

In 2015, after more than a decade working in education, Lusine picked up a brush for the first time. It was not a deliberate career pivot or a lifelong dream finally realized. It was survival.

“I went through personal hardship,” she explains simply. “Art was my safe place to escape and keep my sanity while balancing family, children, work and home.”

Art became her outlet for balance and tranquility not a luxury, but a necessity. She painted to process grief, to quiet the noise of competing demands, to find a space where she could simply exist without performing or adapting. In those first years, her work was deeply personal, therapeutic, a private conversation between her brush and her pain.

What she did not anticipate was that this private healing would eventually lead her toward something public and cultural.

Lusine’s connection to the broader Armenian arts community deepened significantly when she met Stepan Partamian in 2017. This relationship became transformative for her artistic trajectory. Over the years, she exhibited multiple times with  Armenian Arts , the cultural organization that Partamian would later help secure and reopen at its current location at  250 N. Orange in Glendale  in 2024.

The Armenian Arts community provided more than exhibition opportunities; it gave Lusine access to a network of artists, scholars, and cultural practitioners who shared her commitment to preserving and celebrating Armenian heritage. Through these connections and exhibitions, she began to see her personal artistic journey as part of something larger, a collective effort to maintain cultural memory and identity.

The important moment arrived in 2024, when Lusine attended an exhibition by artist Ruzanna Berberyan at Armenian Arts. Even after years of exhibiting there and knowing Partamian since 2017, Berberyan’s work sparked something new: a deeper hunger to understand Armenian cultural traditions at their roots. Lusine realized she wanted not just to paint, but to paint with archaeological and historical purpose, to engage with Armenian culture beyond personal expression.

“I realized I could paint more than pomegranates,” Lusine says, acknowledging the shift from universal themes to culturally specific ones.

She began researching with renewed intensity. What started as curiosity about Armenian artistic traditions became an obsession with their origins. She traced patterns backward through time, from contemporary rugs to the ancient petroglyphs carved into the Syunik and Geghama Mountains. Her research revealed something astonishing: these ancient markings recordings of daily life, ritual, and knowledge were humanity’s earliest attempts at communication, predating written language.

More personally, she discovered that her ancestors had been at the forefront of this evolution. Ancient Armenian petroglyphs had contributed to the development of early writing systems, including Mehenagir and eventually the Armenian alphabet itself. Her ancestors were not passive subjects of history; they were innovators, knowledge-keepers, people who understood the necessity of passing understanding from one generation to the next.

“It’s not so much what I was searching for,” she reflects. “It was more what I discovered and learned.”

The artistic logic that emerged from this research was deceptively simple but conceptually profound. If petroglyphs were carved memories of the Armenian highlands records of daily life, spiritual belief, and cultural knowledge then rugs were the continuation of that impulse. Rugs became woven memories, recording the same stories and symbols, but in a medium that moved, that clothed bodies, that entered homes.

“Rocks were carved memories of Armenian Highlands and rugs became woven memories,” Lusine says.

The shift from stone to textile is not merely aesthetic. Weaving adds something carving cannot: portability, intimacy, and continuity. A petroglyph is fixed, monumental, a statement made once for all time. A rug is mobile, domestic, alive in daily use. By translating petroglyphic symbols into woven patterns, Lusine was tracing the actual path that Armenian visual communication had taken from public monument to private home, from stone to fiber, from the highlands to the diaspora.

Her current exhibition will be held May 25th – July 3rd  at the Glenmark Gallery,  titled “Interconnection,” explores precisely this web of relationships: ancient and modern, homeland and diaspora, individual and civilization, all speaking to each other across time.

But this work carries weight. When you are interpreting ancient cultural symbols, reclaiming heritage that colonialism and displacement have obscured, there is a responsibility that cannot be taken lightly. Lusine is acutely aware of this tension: the balance between authentic preservation and artistic interpretation, between honoring original artisans and creating something new.

Her answer is methodical and humble. She surrounds herself with knowledgeable people with lived experience, historical expertise, and deep cultural grounding. She conducts rigorous research. She educates herself continuously. She refuses to present work without understanding its cultural context and historical accuracy. Her long relationship with Stepan Partamian and the Armenian Arts community has provided ongoing mentorship and guidance, ensuring that her work remains grounded in scholarly rigor and cultural respect.

“I want to contribute to cultural preservation through research, knowledge and continuous education,” she says. “What I am presenting does not distort authenticity.”

This approach grounded in respect, education, and community wisdom reflects a deeper philosophy  where she is wishing the best for the work and for those who came before makes the outcome nicer in the end.

When you approach cultural preservation with genuine care rather than ego, when you seek guidance rather than certainty, when you hope for meaningful impact rather than personal acclaim, the work itself becomes elevated. The pieces she creates carry not just technical skill but intentionality, reverence, and a genuine desire to honor both her ancestors and future generations.

Lusine’s work functions as a form of quiet resistance not the theatrical kind, but the kind that shows up every day, in small, deliberate choices. She speaks Armenian daily despite living in America. She cooks Armenian food, listens to Armenian music, and participates in community events. Through her art, she insists that ancient symbols matter, that Armenian contributions to human civilization deserve recognition, that identity forged in diaspora is valid and valuable.

She is also concerned about what happens when artists like her do not step forward. If younger Armenians do not learn their history and heritage, if they do not understand where they come from, then identity becomes erasable. Each generation that loses connection to cultural roots makes the next generation more vulnerable to erasure.

For young Armenian and Armenian American artists seeking to balance heritage with authenticity, her advice is direct: Don’t get discouraged. Connect with elders who carry knowledge and history. Travel to Armenia. Stay for a month. Let the land remind you of who you are.

“Our land has a way of shaking us to our core,” she says. “Blood has a way of reminding us of our past.”

She also carries an implicit message: approach your work with the best intentions. Wish for something good not just for yourself, but for your culture, your community, your ancestors. That generosity of spirit, that hope for something beautiful and meaningful, transforms the work from personal expression into cultural offering. It makes the end result nicer, richer, more authentic than ego or ambition alone could ever produce.

Thirty years after arriving in America as a girl who spoke Armenian and learned her history, Lusine Saakyan has become a bridge between worlds translating ancient petroglyphs into contemporary art, weaving together displacement and belonging, personal healing and cultural reclamation. Her work suggests that the goal is not to choose between Armenian and American identity, but to understand how they inform and strengthen each other.

In doing so, she has transformed what might have been cultural loss into cultural assertion which is one brushstroke, one woven pattern, one exhibition at a time. And in approaching that work with respect, research, community, and the genuine wish for something good to emerge, she has created something that resonates far beyond herself: a living example of how heritage is not something lost in displacement, but something that can be reclaimed, reinterpreted, and passed forward with intention and care.

As Lusine Saakyan continues this vital work of cultural preservation and artistic innovation, we wish  her voice will grow stronger with each brushstroke, reaching deeper into the hearts of those seeking to understand their roots. Her partnership with people  like Stepan Partamian and institutions like Armenian Arts will continue to deepen and flourish. We wish her to  find endless inspiration in the mountains and symbols of her ancestors, and the joy of creation will sustain her through all the years ahead. Her legacy is already being woven into the fabric of Armenian diaspora identity, and the brightest chapters are yet to come.

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