The Soviet Union's first museum of modern art, opened in 1972 thanks to an unusual pocket of cultural autonomy in Yerevan that allowed Armenian curators to collect work that would have been impossible to show in Moscow or Leningrad. The collection focuses on Armenian non-conformist and experimental art of the 1960s through 1990s — paintings, sculpture, and graphic work by Hakob Hakobyan, Minas Avetisyan, Rudolf Khachatryan, and others.
The museum is small and quirky, with rotating exhibitions of contemporary Armenian and Armenian-diaspora artists. Closed Mondays.