ABELINA GALUSTIAN MEMORIAL SCHOLARSHIP
Born in Tehran, Iran, to Armenian parents of the diaspora, Dr. Abelina Galustian lived most of her life as a local artist and art historian in Glendale, California. During her short life, Abelina pursued two master’s degrees (in Fine Art and Art History) and her PhD in Art History. Through both her feminist art and scholarship, she awed viewers and readers alike with her work, challenging people to see the world differently and to visually consider the invisible politics of gender in new and dynamic ways. Abelina’s potential was limitless, and through this scholarship, we hope that her dedication to feminist art and art history will live on exponentially in future generations.
From an early age, Dr. Galustian was drawn to art—a skill cultivated by her father Vachik Galustian, who owned the famed Meubles Galustian in Iran, and who was an adept furniture maker, woodworker, and artist himself. Galustian earned her Bachelor of the Arts in Fine Arts from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 1997 and went on to pursue her Master’s in Fine Arts (MFA) from California State University, Los Angeles in 2002. During her MFA, Galustian used her art as a means of exploring and commenting upon the dichotomies she experienced as a first-generation Armenian artist in the U.S., examining customs, social practices, and gender roles and the ways these played out in public versus private spaces. Between 2001-2002, Galustian painted a series of monumental, photorealist oil paintings called the Womensword series (a play on words for women’s words as their proverbial weapons or swords). In the series, Galustian quoted from and appropriated famed European “Orientalist” painters, recreating in profound and precise detail their imagined and exoticized scenes of enslaved women and sexual exploits—but with a twist. Galustian reversed the genders and presumed gazes in the paintings, shifting assumptions of power and agency while also highlighting the shocking norm that art viewers are used to seeing naked, objectified, and sexualized women, but are not used to seeing a brazen portrayal of men as the sexualized objects, and women as the agents of desire.
Reception to Galustian’s series was immediately varied: some people condemned the paintings while others praised them. The complex socio-psychological reception of the work led Galustian to pursue critical art history in higher education, earning her Master’s in Art History in 2007 and her PhD in Art History in 2021 from University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, titled “Orienting the Politics of Images: The Armenian Role in Orientalizing Near Eastern Photography, 1850-1930,” melded her passion, interest, and original research on Orientalist art, arguing for the first time that Armenian photographers played an important and complex role in the creation of Orientalist paintings.
After the Womansword series, Dr. Galustian continued to push boundaries with her large-scale photorealistic oil paintings, working in tandem with photographer Hilma Shahinian. Together, they produced The Veiled Series (2007), PLAyatollah (2017), and Miss Illegal Alien (2020). A dedicated feminist scholar, activist, and educator, Galustian also worked as a producer and host to KPFK’s Feminist Magazine Radio Program between 2003-2010 and she contributed to the field of art history in significant ways through her scholarship, academic lectures, artist talks, and interviews. The Mt. SAC community benefited from these artist talks and interviews, as Dr. Galustian visited campus numerous times to speak to our art history classes and students.
Dr. Galustian’s art is in the public collections of the Arab Image Foundation (Beirut, Lebanon); Arab World Institute/Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris, France); Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, Israel); Keck School of Medicine of USC (Los Angeles, California); Museum of Contemporary Art/Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (San Luis Potosi, Mexico); Pera Museum (Istanbul, Turkey); and the State Museum of Painting and Sculpture (Ankara, Turkey), among others.
To learn more about Dr. Galustian’s work, please explore Abelina Galustian: Womansword and Beyond, a museum catalog that accompanied her 2020 exhibition by Stanislaus State’s Stan State Art Space.
To support Mt. SAC art history students in Dr. Galustian’s memory, please give to this memorial scholarship.
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