Biography
Lynne Dian Gulezian has created a series of works that focus on the lives of people she encountered while living part of each year in South Africa over the past two decades. These mixed media works tell the story of calamity and hope in highly imaginative images. They feature portraits, vivid color, and a strong abstract sense of form and texture.
Gulezian grew up in the Germantown and West Oak Lane sections of Philadelphia. Her talent for art was recognized early on. For seven years she attended the city’s Saturday student art classes. Gulezian went on to study at The Tyler School of Art, with a special interest in abstract painting, graduating with a BFA in 1971. An important part of her early years was the presence of her Armenian grandparents on both sides. She grew up sensitized to the tragedy of the Armenian genocide, and to the sense of being part of a small ethnic group in relation to the larger society. Both of these aspects of her formative experiences would emerge years later as part of her work as an artist.
After college, Gulezian taught art in middle school for five years, then worked in television, first as a producer for public television station WHYY in Philadelphia and then at WKBS-TV as its promotion manager. During that period, she produced, wrote, and directed a television documentary on the lives of homeless women in the city. In 1982, her life took a dramatic turn, when she began spending half of the year in Africa with her partner, Gei Zantzinger, an ethno-musicologist and film maker. Over the next twenty-five years, until his death in 2007, based in Johannesburg, they traveled through Sub-Saharan Africa making films, with Gulezian working as the production company’s field producer and manager. During this time South Africa moved from the oppression of apartheid, to political change, and new, still emerging society. Gulezian kept extensive journals of her experiences. She recorded the stories of black South Africans persistent in their dignity and resolve, despite poverty, politics, and the AIDS crisis.
In 1988, Gulezian began making collaged watercolors based on the landscape and animals encountered on her travels. By 1996 she had began large, ambitious textured paintings on paper and linen. These were highly expressive works based on the experiences she recorded in her journals. This ongoing series tells individual stories that reflect a sense of the universal human condition. In 2003, Gulezian showed many of these pieces in a solo exhibition at The Pagus Gallery in Norristown, PA. Bearing Witness was reviewed by Valerie Donohoe of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Starting in 2002, the artist created the eight-part series, Shouting Through Laryngitis: Scenes from an Ethnic Kid’s Life. In 2007 Gulezian was in a group exhibition curated by Kóan Jeff Baysa at City Without Walls in Newark, NJ, and was positively reviewed in the Newark Star Ledger. In October, she will participate in The First Biennial of Armenian Women Artists in New York.
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