Mariam Arshakyan

I am an architect whose path into art feels both inherited and rediscovered. I was born into a family of architects, and my grandfather, Henrik Mamyan, an Honored Artist of Armenia, was a renowned graphic artist known especially for his book illustrations. Growing up beside him meant growing up inside images. Books were never just texts to me; they were parallel worlds shaped by lines, shadows, and imagination.

Drawing was a natural language in my childhood, but during my student years architecture demanded most of my time, and drawing slowly receded into the background. It wasn’t until 2020, during the global pandemic, that art returned to me with full force. Isolated with my family in our countryside home, surrounded by Armenian mountains and nature, I found both time and silence. I began drawing again not with intention, but with necessity and it transported me somewhere deeply internal and freeing.

Art first entered the public sphere of my life through solidarity. After the Beirut explosion, as a member of MEDS (Meeting of Design Students), I began selling my artworks to support our Lebanese friends, donating all proceeds. The same happened later during the renewed war in Artsakh. Art, for me, became not only expression, but...

I studied architecture, an education that deeply formed my artistic practice. Architectural studies shaped my way of seeing the world - teaching me to think through space, proportion, rhythm, and materiality. Even when my work moves toward abstraction or emotion, it remains grounded in structure and spatial logic.

Alongside formal architectural education, I have been shaped by collective learning and international exchange through different international practices, where collaboration, experimentation, and social responsibility play a central role. Growing up in a family of architects and artists, and being close to my grandfather’s graphic practice, also functioned as an informal yet powerful education — one rooted in observation, storytelling, and visual sensitivity.

My artistic education continues to evolve through practice itself, where architecture and art constantly inform and reshape one another.

"Architects who draw", 2021, union of architects, Yerevan.
"Competitive exhibition", 2023, Union of artists of Armenia, Yerevan.
"Competitive exhibition", 2025, Union of artists of Armenia, Yerevan.