Kegham Tazian (Born 1938) Armenian/American, Signed and Numbered Lithograph. Depicts a blue-hued abstract assemblage of images and script that looks like a woman wearing Middle Eastern garb. Signed in pencil bottom right. Numbered 20/75 in pencil bottom left. Framed. 

Overall Size: 28 1/2 x 24 1/4 in. 

Sight Size: 19 3/4 x 15 1/2 in. 

Kegham Tazian was born in Armenia in 1938. His mother, displaced during the troubled times of World War I that culminated in the Armenian Genocide, was taken to Beirut, Lebanon as a child to study in a Catholic convent. During a lull in the unrest her family moved her back to Turkey, but after her marriage and the birth of her five children, of which Kegham was the youngest, the entire family relocated to Lebanon with the support of the French government to escape their  impending arrest and likely death. Tazian’s father died when he was 4, and his mother carried on raising the family alone, nurturing his early ambition to become an artist. With hardly any formal training in his youth, he relocated to the United States in 1956 to study at St. Francis College in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He obtained his bachelors in art and a masters in education, before pursuing an MFA in sculpture at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, graduating in 1966. For the next 47 years he taught art at Oakland Community College’s Orchard Ridge Campus in Farmington Hills, while maintaining an active studio practice, showing his work regularly in galleries around the country and fulfilling numerous commissions for public art in the Detroit area. Attracted to a wide variety of mediums and subjects, he painted, sculpted, and taught multiple generations of budding artists, becoming one of the most prolific and influential artist-teachers in the Midwest. With over 40 solo exhibitions around the world from Ann Arbor to London to Lebanon, Tazian’s work can be found in countless museums, embassies, and private collections across the globe. Since his retirement from teaching in 2014, Tazian has even increased his creative output, and was honored by Governor Whitmer in 2020 with a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to arts education.