Ellina Kevorkian
Interdisciplinary Art
Minneapolis, MN
Ellina Kevorkian is an artist, curator, and arts administrator whose focus is situated between her interests in both the visual arts and performance–she follows experimental works that push the boundaries of expectation, whether redefining medium, discipline, or social construct.
Through her own paintings and video art, she looks at intersections among feminism, identity, and autobiography– often with the participation of her twin sister, as well as her children– while observing cultural representations of women. Kevorkian has participated in solo and group exhibitions, showing her work at Western Project, Mark Moore Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, The Center for the Art of Performance at University of California Los Angeles, as well as having been included in the Southern California Council of the National Museum of Women in the Arts-sponsored retrospective Multiple Vantage Points: Southern California Women Artists, 1980-2006. Her work was recently written about by Sunjata Iyengar in Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies—Gender, Race and Sexuality, published by Routledge Press, edited by Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez.
Curatorially, Kevorkian supports work that not only challenges expectations of method and content between disciplines, but also fights for integrity in the arts, for the artist’s intention, for the inclusion of under-recognized voices, and advocates for artist sustainability. But it is the pursuit of the idea, regardless of medium, that fuels an interdisciplinary approach to her work. She is excited by artists who explore the human condition– through sensual materiality or experience and/or response– who engage and reflect human vulnerability and empathic need for connection. Equally, she is interested in artists who investigate and respond to how these impulses can lead to failure. She views almost all work through this humanist framework. Kevorkian served as artistic director for residency programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE, and later, as artistic director at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis, MN.
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