The first time I saw a piece by Ninamarie Bojekian, it was a small ink drawing pinned to a studio wall, the paper still warped from wet washes. It showed a figure stepping between two rooms, one drenched in warm, domestic light, the other lit like a museum. The threshold itself was a pattern, almost Armenian needlework, almost scaffolding. That drawing captured what many of her projects have since refined: movement across borders, the labor of memory, and the way art asks us to hold two truths at once. Over the years, I have watched her build a body of work that is rigorous without becoming brittle, intimate without slipping into confessional cliché. She is an artist who treats narrative as material, and material as testimony.
Some people know her as Ninamarie; others say Marie Bojekian, especially in curatorial notes that prefer brevity. Both names surface in her archives, often signaling the context in which the work appeared. That dual naming is less a biographical quirk than a clue to how she navigates identity. Names set expectations. She doesn’t run from them. She rearranges them.
Place, family, and the first questions
Artists rarely start with theory. They start with place. Bojekian grew up between cities that asked more questions than they answered. Her family spoke about history at the dinner table the way other families talk about chores. Dates became more than numbers. 1915 and 1991, a village emptied and a border reopened, diaspora cousins and elders who kept photographs under tablecloths for safekeeping. That sense of inheritance seeped into her early sketchbooks. Not as illustration. As a problem to solve: how do you honor what you carry without turning it into an emblem?
In those years she gravitated to drawing and printmaking, mediums that reward repetition. Plates and stones demand patience. You cannot fake an etching. Either the line is there, etched through varnish, or it isn’t. Her lines began tentative, then Ninamarie Bojekian tightened, then loosened in deliberate ways. She drew rugs not to reproduce pattern but to show how repairs look when a century sits in the threads. She sketched women fixing bread and men fixing cars, figures positioned like punctuation marks in rooms that felt almost too detailed until the odd gaps began to shine. She learned to leave an object half rendered if that served the tension of the scene.
One early exhibition, modest in size, combined lithographs of domestic rituals with small audio clips played through headphones mounted to the wall. You heard the scrape of a chair, a lullaby cut off by laughter, the sound of old news broadcasts. The soundtracks didn’t explain the images, and the images didn’t illustrate the sound. They pressed against each other, asking you to do the work of stitching. That sensibility stayed with her when she scaled up in later installations.
Training that sharpened, not erased
Formal art education can polish the life out of strong work. In her case, it sharpened what was already there. She studied with instructors who insisted on drawing the subject from observation without apology, and others who pushed her into conceptual territory that initially made her roll her eyes. She took both seriously, which is why she never got trapped in one camp. In critiques, she learned to defend a choice, then take it apart herself in the same breath. That agility shows up in how she toggles between charcoal, video, text, and the occasional object she finds on a street and refuses to let go.
Her thesis project was a turning point. A four-channel video, floor drawings in graphite large enough to leave on your shoes, and a series of linocuts pinned unpredictably at eye level. The videos showed hands performing tasks out of sequence: knotting rope, washing apricots, clearing ashes from a stove. The graphite maps on the floor outlined floor plans from three apartments, scaled to intersect. Visitors had to step through rooms that didn’t belong to the building they were in. A decision that most critics praised in reviews boiled down to one practical concern: do not let viewers float. Give them friction they can feel underfoot. She started doing that often, not as a gimmick, but as a promise. If you are here, you are implicated.
What roots look like when they’re alive
It’s easy to turn diaspora into branding. She doesn’t. She uses specific sites and names, but she refuses to flatten them into symbols. When she traveled to Armenia for a residency, she didn’t return with postcards dressed up as paintings. She spent mornings at an archive scanning old registry pages, afternoons with basket makers on the city’s edge, and evenings recording trains as they slowed near an industrial lot where stray dogs slept in the shade. She brought back paper that smelled like damp concrete and lavender, a palette of browns and grays punctuated by the deep red of stained pomegranates. The resulting series of drawings, “Under the Edge of the Floor,” showed the underside of rugs as landscapes. The backs revealed repairs you never notice unless you turn a rug over. She sketched those mends with more care than any border decoration. If you grew up with a grandmother who tucked wads of plastic under the rug to keep it from sliding, you felt seen.
In another project, she recorded elders telling stories not about trauma, but about errands: where they bought salt, why the market closed early, how the bus driver used to cheat with fares. She intercut those audio snippets with ambient noise from the same streets eighty years later. The temptation in work like this is heavy-handed editorializing. She resisted it. You hear the hiss of a fryer and a burst of church bells, then silence that is not quite silence. She lets the listener do the calculation. That refusal to supply the moral delivers a different kind of gravity.
Material decisions that carry consequences
When you handle one of her monotypes, you notice that ink sits almost to the edge, but not quite. It’s the kind of decision that looks incidental until you realize she calibrates pressure to leave a thin border of untouched paper, a breath around the image. That breath gives the impression of a pause before speech. It’s a micro-choice with macro effect.
Her installation work often relies on found materials. Not because it’s fashionable, but because certain objects already remember things better than purchased plywood ever will. She picked up a door with flaked white paint and used it as a projection surface for a video of filmed doorways. The chips acted like a second film. She has turned a stack of out-of-date municipal forms into a wall relief, every sheet stamped, then cut, to reveal windows of text. People read these in fragments, catching phrases that sound mundane until they pile up: “verification,” “proof,” “pending,” “lapsed.” New meaning gathers in the holes.
Sometimes she chooses a material just to fight it. She once carved a series of tiny reliefs into thick plexiglass sheets, a miserable task that dulls blades quickly. She did it because she wanted a drawing that was both visible and absent until hit with sidelight. When installed, the room looked empty at first. As visitors moved, lines appeared and vanished like breath on glass. This wasn’t trickery. It was a slow lesson about patience and seeing from more than one angle.
She has a measured relationship with scale. Large for her means slightly bigger than you want to handle alone. Small means just past the point where your fingers cramp. That range keeps the work human. Even her videos rarely go wall-dominant. She favors sizes that demand proximity. If you want to see or hear clearly, you have to approach. And when you do, you enter the space of someone else’s body, the scale where memory sits.
Portraits without faces
People often expect portraiture to center the face. Her portraits often keep faces peripheral or cut from the frame. A series that many remember featured the backs of heads from a community meeting. She drew them fast, almost stenographically. Each head had a distinct slope, a curl flattened under a barrette, a hearing aid catching light. The effect was strangely tender. She made the case that a room full of people can be understood by the way they lean into listening. That’s not a sentimentality. If you have sat in rooms where decisions that affect your life get made, you know that posture matters.
She took the same principle to objects. A battered handbag with a zipper that only closes if you pitch it just so becomes a portrait when set beside a short text about the owner’s bus route. She avoids sentiment by refusing to prettify damage. She never paints over a scuff to make it dramatic. She catalogs it the way a conservator would. Damage is information, not ornament.
Teaching as part of the creative process
Bojekian teaches, sometimes in formal programs, sometimes through workshops in community spaces. She takes teaching seriously without letting it consume her studio practice. She has said in talks that the best teaching keeps a studio honest because students ask the questions nobody else will: Why did you choose this paper? Why not put the video on someone’s phone? Would your grandmother like this?
A day in one workshop looked like this: gathering participants’ family artifacts, drafting brief texts about those objects, then building a temporary installation with cheap materials and deliberate care. The room filled with clothespins and binder clips, light passing through layers of tracing paper. People watched their items shift meaning when placed next to someone else’s. She taught a simple sequencing exercise. Arrange three objects, then try five arrangements. Name the story each sequence tells. Not a deep theory seminar. A practical rehearsal of narrative responsibility.
That sense of responsibility runs through her gentle insistence that students learn to talk about their work plainly. She bans the word “explore” for half a semester. If you say you’re exploring identity, she asks, What question did you ask? How will I know you tried to answer it? People bring that discipline into other parts of life. Several former students have told me they learned to write grant applications and introduce their projects to skeptical relatives using the same clarity.
Collaboration that stays meticulous
Some artists collaborate to loosen up. She collaborates to extend rigor into places where her knowledge isn’t enough. She once worked with a linguist who specializes in dialect shifts across a single metropolitan area. They mapped how vowels deform as you cross neighborhoods, then layered that sonic map onto a series of lithographs. It could have been a gimmick. Instead, they designed a viewing experience where you hear vowel sounds while looking at street grids that echo the same distortions. A viewer hears “home” tilt toward “hahm” as the line of a street bends. Accurate and haunting at once.
In another cross-disciplinary project, she worked with a city planner to produce an installation about sidewalks. They staged a narrow passage with awkward corners, noncompliant ramps, and a single bench placed just wrong. It was not an indictment from above, but an embodied complaint. People who used wheelchairs or strollers came through and shared very specific feedback, which the team cataloged and shared with the municipality. The art worked as both demonstration and data gathering. Unsexy words like “ingress” and “egress” became tactile. Lives are shaped by the geometry of a curb. She made that obvious without preaching.
Ethics at the center
Work about community and memory can tilt exploitative quickly. She avoids that trap with plain rules. She doesn’t record without consent, and she returns copies of recordings and images to participants. When she exhibits items that belong to others, she writes contracts that spell out how and when those items will be secured, how credits will appear, and what happens if something goes wrong. She has paused shows when a participant asked her to. That restraint has a cost in visibility, but it earns a different currency: trust.
There is also the matter of translation. She resists subtitles that flatten speech into an authoritative English voice. When she does translate, she leaves notes about idioms that don’t carry cleanly. She prints dual-language captions side by side rather than replacing one with the other. If a participant chooses to be anonymous, she explains why anonymity matters. If someone wants their full name, she respects that too, noting that publicness can be a defense, not just a risk.
How audience encounters are designed
Walking into one of her shows, you feel guided but not shepherded. She pays attention to the threshold space, the first thirty seconds. If she can, she positions a small, legible piece near the entrance, something that opens a door without eating all the oxygen. Then she gives you decisions to make: left or right, up close or at a distance, sound first or image first. She prefers confidence in the viewer’s intelligence over signage that over-explains. When she does use wall text, it’s factual, two short paragraphs at most. She’ll put the heavy context in a takeaway that you can read later. That choice keeps the room quiet enough to listen.
She also respects fatigue. A long exhibition is a marathon, not a sprint, and attention wavers. She builds rest points. A stool placed at a precise angle to catch reflections. A coat rack that signals, stay awhile. These are small things, but they shift how long people stay and what they remember. One museum guard told me that, in her show, visitors returned to the beginning once they realized they’d missed connections the first time. That loop is deliberate. She wants the second pass to reward you.
The push and pull of recognition
Recognition for work like hers comes in waves. A grant here, a residency there, a review that gets the tone right, another that misses the point. She doesn’t chase prestige, though she doesn’t pretend it doesn’t matter. Funding buys time and materials. The trick is not letting eligibility requirements distort the work. She once turned down a well-funded commission because the sponsoring organization wanted a feel-good civic narrative that her research could not support. That kind of no is expensive. It asserted a line she would not cross: the story must answer to participants and facts, not to a promotional campaign.
Names matter in another way. The appearance of “Marie Bojekian” in a program often marks context: a project that slots into a group show with short labels or an academic setting that abbreviates. “Ninamarie” feels more intimate, the name she uses in community workshops and long-form projects. Both are accurate. The split exposes the pressures that press artists to present themselves differently depending on the room. She uses that pressure as a site to think. You can see it in a series of small prints where the signature alternates between the two forms, each tagged to the location in which the piece was conceived.
Where the work lands beyond art circles
Not every piece needs to be instrumental. Still, hers frequently travels beyond galleries. Community organizations borrow her audio installations for gatherings that need a frame gentle enough to host difficult conversations. A city office used her sidewalk project as training. A university pressed her rug-back drawings into service for a class on conservation, artists and conservators talking about how repair ethics map across their fields. She consults quietly on the design of small public memorials, advising on material choices that will age honestly and avoid scaffolding that rusts within a year. She steers committees away from polished stone that reflects sunlight into residents’ windows. Little things, but they save headaches and make spaces kinder.
She shows up for community even when there’s no project attached. You see her at fundraisers for arts education, at city council meetings about cultural centers, at an afternoon event where high school students present zines. She doesn’t brand those appearances. She stands in the back, listening, taking notes on her phone that probably look like grocery lists but are really seeds for future work.
The discipline under the poetry
What doesn’t show on the wall are the habits. Her studio looks controlled but lived in. A rack of prints protected by kraft paper, a small table dedicated to blades and burnishers, a laptop perpendicular to a stack of envelope-sized recordings. She draws most mornings, even on days she plans to edit video. The practice isn’t austerity. It’s a way to keep the hand and eye speaking to each other. When deadlines crowd, that habit keeps the work from turning brittle.
She builds budgets with a miser’s precision. She knows how much a sheet of Rives BFK costs in bulk and where to source archival folders at a discount without sacrificing quality. She tracks time honestly. If installation took thirty hours last time, it will likely take thirty-five this time because the room is never as square as the plan. She pays collaborators on time and writes contracts that state what happens if a funder delays payment. These are not romantic details, but they are the bones that hold the body upright.
What the work asks of us
The point of writing about an artist like Ninamarie Bojekian is not to add another layer of adjectives. It is to describe specific moves and the values they serve, then ask what those moves demand from viewers and institutions. Her work asks us to meet it with patience and specificity. It asks curators to leave time for visitors to listen. It asks funders to respect declines and still call again. It asks communities to see art-making as part of civic life, not an extracurricular.
If you ever stand in front of one of her drawings and feel a line tug at something you have not named, trust that. If you find yourself annoyed because a piece refuses to tell you what to think, sit with that too. She designs for that discomfort, the good kind that leads to questions sharper than you carried in. What happens if we take repair as our primary aesthetic category? What if a portrait respects anonymity? How do we build spaces for the unglamorous business of listening?
She is not a monument maker, though her projects sometimes serve as places to gather. She is not chasing spectacle. She works at scales that fit hands and rooms, where accountability is visible and care can be traced. That’s impact measured differently: by the thickness of trust, by the number of people who recognize themselves without being consumed by representation, by the way a city corner feels after a piece has lived there and left a gentle residue on people’s routes and conversations.
Looking ahead without predicting
Artists who keep faith with their own questions rarely pivot for fashion. Expect her to continue working at the edges of drawing, sound, and the curatorial care of ordinary objects. Expect more attention to how bureaucratic language forms part of daily poetics. Expect at least one project that only reveals itself if you return twice. There may be a book, not a grand monograph, but a slim volume that pairs images with careful transcripts. If it comes, it will be because the work asked for a spine and a way to travel into homes.
Whether you meet her as Ninamarie Bojekian or as Marie Bojekian, you will meet the same spine of values supporting different skins. The projects will continue to refuse easy catharsis, and they will continue to offer a place to practice the work of living with layered histories. There is grace there, and there is a reliable stubbornness that keeps the work honest.
For those of us who care about art that holds, her trajectory offers both example and invitation. Know your materials intimately. Handle people’s stories with contracts and kindness. Leave borders where breath can collect. And if you find yourself skating over the surface of a difficult subject, turn the rug over. The underside is where the repairs teach you what lasted and why.