We know Rima Makaryan primarily as a painter.
She is the founder of The Monarch Project, dedicated to humanizing the stories of immigrants, and a contributor to SCAPE, a group of artists working to elevate images of social justice leaders. She was the lead artist on the “Dreamer” mural at Montgomery High School, a piece meant to portray the beauty of the immigrant story.
The 19-year-old Montgomery graduate currently studying architectural design at Stanford University has earned plaudits and praise for her thought-provoking murals and her commitment to putting humanity, in all of its complicated, beautiful tangles, at the fore of her pieces.
But last winter, she produced something that looks and feels different. And she followed it this summer with something different still.
Using her winter break from Stanford to travel, Makaryan went to Armenia, where she was raised in the Lori Province until she was 8 and her family moved to Santa Rosa.
It wasn’t her first trip back to where she grew up, but on this visit she had a focused intention: To document the stories of Armenians displaced in the bloody conflict with its neighbor to the east, Azerbaijan.
“You could definitely feel very deeply the postwar energy,” she said. “I was there in the dead of winter and it was freezing and it just felt like the whole country was in constant mourning. The core memory I had of Armenia, none of that seemed to exist anymore. It was like a dystopian version of my country.”
She photographed a toddler in winter jump suit stoking a fire. She captured a woman delicately pouring tea. She documented an aging man crying.
She documented their lives, in many cases showing the unspeakable pain of displacement. Many spoke of feeling explosions and fleeing their houses with nothing. They wept over homes and a homeland they feared they would never see again.
Makaryan kept a notebook and wrote what she describes as online diary entries about what she saw, but she also took video and voice recordings. That was a crucial component, she said.
“A lot of projects like this include a lot of pity,” she said. “That was not what I was going for. It was empowerment. I wanted them to speak for themselves.”
She called it the “Forgotten Faces of Artsakh.”
Life in the portion of Armenia remains unsettled and unsettling.
Last month, nearly a year since the escalation of conflict, the U.N. World Court heard from officials from both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Each side claims the other has violated the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, according to Reuters.
Each side accuses the other of systematic ethnic cleansing.
The World Court, formally known as the International Court of Justice, is the U.N. court for resolving disputes between countries. It has not yet made a ruling in the case.
“There is a very long history associated with this conflict,” Makaryan said.
It was during the project during her winter break that she got a lead on yet another way to help.
She met the leader of the nonprofit Little Star Fund. The group has established training in beekeeping, agriculture and chemical-free farming — all with the intention of giving villagers the tools to stay and thrive in their own communities.
Keying in on the theme of self-determination, Makaryan was drawn to the work. She offered her help.
She started by contributing virtually. She designed a logo for the organization.
Then Makaryan agreed to return to Armenia this summer. She offered to run an arts program for kids. She lived in an apartment attached to the community center in the small village where she worked.
“That was a pretty amazing experience,” she said.
This time, she focused on the light she saw instead of the dark. It was less dystopian and more hopeful.
“When I went back this summer, there was a shift,” she said.
Makaryan wanted to build on that. But she also wanted to keep true to her feeling that Armenians don’t want pity, they want empowerment.
So created projects based on identity and focused on strength and beauty.
“Just how strong and how powerful they are as a people,” she said. “Their glorious history, just taking pride in being Armenian.”
And this time, she wanted to focus her artistic lens on kids.
“It was all about getting kid a chance of pace and making sure that they were in school and not working,” she said. “A lot of kids sell candles, which I don’t think kids should be doing when they are in elementary school.”
Through Little Star, Makaryan ran summer arts camps, teaching artistic concepts and having the young artists contribute to a 10-feet by 35-feet mural that today adorns the side of the community center.
“Kids would alternate between separate arts classes where they would learn color theory and shading. Really fundamental stuff like that,” she said. “Then we’d go outside and paint flowers on the mural itself.”
Makaryan designed the mural to incorporate butterflies and wildflowers found around the village. They represent growth.
“It’s realizing your power and seeing yourself as beautiful, as an Armenian person,” she said.
Throughout the summer, kids could see metamorphosis on the wall of the community center and, hopefully, within themselves.
“You are seeing change is possible,” Makaryan said.
“It’s a very colorful, very bright, very hopeful work of art and you did that. That was you holding the paintbrush and painting butterflies.”
Makaryan wants to grow the program. Next summer, she hopes to bring more artists from the U.S. to Armenia to reach more kids, to create more art.
It’s a program that beautifies the landscape and empowers young people. But, it is also work that fortifies Makaryan.
“I want to be an artist for as long as I can be,” she said.
“That is essential to my happiness.”
You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or . On Twitter @benefield.