A new exhibition opens this Saturday at the Wired Gallery in High Falls, titled “Travel as Muse,” and the road to its creation is a long and adventurous one. When Wired came into being in 2012, the original concept was to fill a gap left after the economic collapse of 2008 had induced many local art galleries to close up shop. Legendary restaurateur John Novi of the DePuy Canal House invited Sevan Melikyan to show some of his own works — what the artist-turned-gallerist calls “reduced constructions,” each inspired by a favorite work of art seen in a museum — in an uninsulated barn whose walls proved too fragile to hang the art directly. The pieces had to be hung up on wires running from floor to ceiling, whence the name. People came to see them, though, and soon Melikyan was inviting other local artists to fill the space with their works.
In the next couple of years, the Wired Gallery moved twice, finally settling into a permanent home at 11 Mohonk Road in 2014. Around the perimeter of the floor and ceiling of the main exhibition room run metal pipes, allowing attachment of vertical wires to hang heavier artworks, as in the original barn space. The mission of the gallery — to highlight the works of artists from Ulster County and the immediate vicinity — has remained consistent as well. Melikyan has no difficulty finding local artists whose work is of the highest quality and typically hangs eight to nine shows per year. “I never seem to find the bottom of it,” he says.
In 2020, however, with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the bottom fell out of the general public’s ability to congregate in art venues. The gallery had to close for several months, to reopen on a limited scale for a while with “one-wall shows” featuring a single artist. Fortunately, Melikyan had a way to stay sane and keep busy sharing the art he loves with a broader audience: conducting virtual art tours via Zoom. Beginning in 2018, he had already curated live tours of Provence and Italy for a company called Artful Journeys, and his employer needed someone to keep clients engaged online until the art tourism business was up and running again.
Haunting museums and galleries was in Melikyan’s blood from a young age. Born to an Armenian family in Turkey, he moved to Paris at the age of 9, when the war with Greece over the island of Cyprus was making life “unsettled” for ethnic and religious minorities even in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul. His father encouraged his interest in drawing and sketching by hiring an artist to give him lessons, and Sevan spent much of his teens and early 20s soaking up modern art in French museums.
“Matisse showed me the window through which I entered the world of art,” he recalls. “That started my quest.” He also studied piano, drummed on pots and pans and began organizing art and music salons in the family home. “Whenever something really excited me, I wanted to share it. I always believed that talent needs to be showcased.”
When it came time for university, Melikyan yearned to learn to be a curator, but France’s elite art scene wasn’t open at the time to admitting immigrants to such closely cherished posts. So he studied marketing, taking six years to complete his degree. “I was bored to death,” he says. “Multiple times, I came to the brink of dropping out.” His diploma did, however, enable him to get a visa to work in the U.S. with sponsorship by a New York City-based nonprofit, the Armenian General Benevolent Union.
That organization offered him a job helping to establish an arts department. “I had to scout for talented Armenians to bring to New York: musicians, playwrights, producers. The idea was to introduce the Armenian identity to the general public.” His research led him to classical pianist Armen Babakhanian, who had placed fifth in the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 1993. That’s how he got acquainted with Maria Guralnik, a Van Cliburn employee who had been appointed as Babakhanian’s manager during his travels in the U.S.
As it happened, Guralnik was planning a visit to New York, where she had grown up as the daughter of a concert pianist dad and a mom who was one of the Mohonk Mountain House Smileys. They met, bonded over a shared love of the songs of Jacques Brel and fell quickly in love. “My father told me I’d have to marry a green-eyed girl, since very few Armenians have green eyes, so the chance of marrying a cousin would be nil,” Melikyan recalls. “And a psychic told Maria that she’d marry a foreigner. So I guess we were meant for each other.”
The two carried on a long-distance relationship after Guralnik went back to her job in Fort Worth, but got married in less than a year — at Mohonk, of course. Melikyan joined her in Texas, took a marketing position at the Van Cliburn headquarters, started painting on the side and found a gallery to represent his work. They had a son, Robert, and in 2009 moved to High Falls so that Maria could be closer to her mother, Pat Guralnik, who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Maria quickly secured a position at SUNY Purchase teaching arts management, but the transition to the Hudson Valley left Melikyan feeling unmoored professionally for a while. He lost his inspiration to paint, got more serious about drumming, joined a band called Fishbowl, learned website design and gave lectures about art — especially former High Falls resident Marc Chagall — at retirement homes. When the opportunity opened up to become a curator at last, he found his footing once again. The Wired Gallery has since become a respected showcase for the best in local art.
By the time the pandemic came around, Melikyan had already curated and led several art tours in Europe for Artful Journeys. His passion for art, his broad knowledge base and his enthusiasm for sharing made him an engaging host, and he continued to communicate all that when the tours had to go virtual. He built a whole new lecture series for the company. But when real-life travel resumed, the owner of the company decided first that she wanted to shift her focus to classical music, and soon after that it was time to retire. She urged Melikyan to take up the torch and organize art tours himself — bookings, logistics and all.
And so it was that a new business came into being, known as Artblazing Tours. With assistance from Maria and his sister, Sheyda Eversley, Melikyan is now an art tourism entrepreneur, leading trips in spring and fall when the gallery is on hiatus between exhibitions. In 2025, they visited Istanbul, Belgium and the Netherlands, Malta and Sicily. This spring, they revisited Sicily and Malta and added a Provence trip. They’ll return to Istanbul the first week in October and launch a new itinerary in Spain a week later.
These highly specialized tours naturally appeal to people with a strong curiosity about the visual arts, of course. And a large percentage of the participants are working artists themselves — some of them folks who have had shows up at Wired Gallery in the past. It’s their work, inspired by the things they saw on these tours, that will adorn the walls beginning this weekend. Marcia Clark, Julie Fornaci, Pam Garrit, Susan Hennelly, Dion Ogust, Fran Sutherland, Doris Vaughn and Beverly Wallace are the featured artists.
It was on last autumn’s journey to the rich cultural cityscape of Istanbul that the idea for the “Travel as Muse” exhibition began to germinate. “The artists started showing sketches at dinner,” Melikyan says. “We had been at this venue, built in the 1400s, watching whirling dervishes. Picture-taking is not allowed there, but nobody forbids making sketches. Dion [Ogust] was feverishly trying to capture what she saw. It only lasted an hour, but it left such a mark in her psyche.” He recalls watercolorist Fran Sutherland making preliminary studies on the tour as well: “She sketches on the bus while it’s bouncing around.”
New destinations for Artblazing Tours are in the works for next year, possibly including Paris, Prague and Vienna. And new extensions, including culinary arts destinations, are being added as options to tours that have already become successful. Melikyan says that this group show is likely to be the first of a series, as more artists sign up to participate in the journeys abroad. “This brings together the two sides of me,” he explains. “Being able to create this environment gives me incredible satisfaction. I feel like I’m the matchmaker to the people who gave birth to this art.”
The opening reception for “Travel as Muse” takes place from 5 to 7 p.m. this Saturday, May 23, and is free and open to the public. The show will be up through Sunday, June 21. Gallery hours are from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday. The Wired Gallery is located at 11 Mohonk Road in High Falls, just a block or so south of Route 213. For more information, visit thewiredgallery.com, facebook.com/wiredgallery or call 682-564-5613. To learn more about upcoming Artblazing Tours, visit artblazing.com.
Join the family! 
