Carol Peligian
LONG ISLAND CITY, NY
CAROL PELIGIAN
“I think that my heritage was incredibly important in this idea that you can just do what you want to do and continue and go on. My father’s mother and father both survived the Armenian Genocide in 1915 Ottoman Turkey… I think every one of us standing is a testament, a miracle, to those ancestors that managed to survive and to live and to flourish.”
Carol Peligian was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1954. As a child she drew obsessively—a passion which was recognized early on with a scholarship to attend the Rhode Island School of Design Saturday school in 1963.
Following her graduation from RISD, Peligian moved to New York and began drawing large nature-based forms, abstracting them with various materials and manipulating their scale. But when a flood destroyed her studio in 1983, taking with it 3,000 works, Peligian spent a decade away from art making and instead focused on freelance design work to pay rent.
Her return to creating art in 1992 after she secured her own studio space to begin anew marked an intensification of her earlier themes and an increased focus on memory, time, and beauty. Inspired by the natural world as well as the material realities of her disparate media, Peligian’s practice is one of metamorphic inquiry. Drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation come together to explore how internal and external forces coexist. In her work she experiments with vastly varying materials, both synthetic and natural, from aerospace grade aluminum and blackened steel, to 18k rose gold and mink fur.
Peligian is of Armenian descent and was born to a family of genocide survivors. In 2018, she created Susurrus, a public sculpture for South Florida’s Nova Southeastern University that pays homage to the Armenian Genocide victims, as well as the victims of the subsequent four genocides that took place in the 20th century.
Peligian has exhibited internationally, including a major show at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York in 2008, and False Flag gallery in 2019.
The Artist Profile Archive interviews with Peligian took place in 2019 in her Long Island City studio and in her solo exhibition at False Flag, of body, where she explained the creative and technical processes behind creating her works on view.
“I’ve always been obsessed by the body, and how we are ushered into the world through the pelvis.”
“How can I take something terribly elemental, heavy, impossible and transcend it and lift it?
I began to paint in body shops, in boatyards.”
“There is no way I could live long enough to produce what I want to produce. I can’t stop.”
