Kevork Mourad

Visual Artist

Kevork Mourad
Kevork Mourad was born in Kamechli, a town in the upper reaches of Syria. Of Armenian origin, he received his MFA from the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts in Armenia, and he now lives and works in New York. 

He is represented by Galerie Claude Lemand in Paris, and Rafia Gallery in Dubai. 

He has had solo exhibitions around the Middle East and the United States, including at the Doris Duke Shangrila Center for Islamic Arts in Honolulu, and has participated in Art Moment 2014 in Budapest, Hungary. His digital piece, The Map of Future Movements, toured as part of a group exhibition in Jerusalem and Ramallah, and was in the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. He has several pieces in the permanent collection of the World Bank.

Through spontaneous painting/animation — a collaboration of art and music — he has worked with many world-class musicians. His past and current projects include the Cirène project with members of Brooklyn Rider at the Metropolitan Museum, the multi-media play Lost Spring (2015) with Anaïs Alexandra Tekerian at the MuCEM and National Sawdust, Gilgamesh (2003) and Home Within (2013) with Kinan Azmeh, which have toured the world, performances with the Silk Road Ensemble at the Nara Museum, Japan, and the Rubin Museum of Art, among others, Lembit Beecher’s I Have No Stories to Tell You, commissioned by Opera Philadelphia, Master Peter’s Puppet Show (2015) with The Knights at Tanglewood, and Barbed Wire (2015), with Issam Rafea, commissioned by The Space, UK.

He has performed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Chelsea Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Chess Festival of Mexico City, Morgenland Festival, Le Festival du Monde Arabe in Montreal, the Stillwater Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, Harvard University, Lincoln Center Atrium, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park’s Summerstage, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and the ElbPhilharmonie in Hamburg. He had two major works exhibited at the Rose Art Museum in Boston and also recently exhibited at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.

He was awarded the Robert Bosch Stiftung prize for animation in 2016, with animator Waref Abu Quba, for their film Four Acts for Syria, which will appear in 2018.

He has been commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a performance piece for their 2018 exhibition about historic Armenia. 

He is a member, as a visual artist, of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, and he appears in the recent documentary about the group, The Music of Strangers.