Beautiful minds

It’s been almost a decade since the Fulbright Foundation in Greece launched its Fulbright Alumni Arts Series-Art Supports Education initiative–a way to publicize the foundation’s work to a broader, and slightly different, audience as well as a way for artists who have received the foundation’s support can give something back. Fulbright artist alumni donate their artworks to help raise funds for the Fulbright Scholarship Program. Or, as Fulbright Greece director Artemis Zenetou says, it’s a way for Fulbright alumni to help pass the torch to the next generation.
To date, participating Fulbright alumni artists include Erieta Attali, Dora Economou, Zoe Keramea, Sia Kyriakakos, Lambros Papanikolatos, Vangelis Pliarides, Costas Varotsos, Zafos Xagoraris, Sotos Zachariadis and Theodoros Zafeiropoulos.
Every year, the Foundation also selects one artist to develop a limited edition work of art. Now this year, the Fulbright Foundation has teamed with the Benaki Museum, where the exhibition Art Supports Education opened in January. Limited edition art works created by Fulbright alumni are also on sale at the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street Annex through April 30. Proceeds go to the support the scholarship fund that has provided some 4,700 grants in all fields of the arts and sciences with their studies and research, including Andreas Papandreou, National Art Gallery director Marina Lambraki-Plaka, and choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou. As for the Benaki connection: museum director Angelos Delivorrias is himself a Fulbright scholar.

Photo 1

Internationally known artist and sculptor Costas Varotsos has created a limited edition print to commemorate the Fulbright Foundation's 60th anniversary. Varotsos received a Fulbright Artist Scholarship in 1990-91 to study at the Experimental Glass workshop in New York. He created the drawing/print based on his work Dromeas (The Runner), a twelve-meter-high glass and iron sculpture installed at the meeting point of Vassilissis Sofias and Vassileos Konstantinou streets across from the National Art Gallery. Varotsos lives and works in Greece. His works are in major private collections and museums internationally and has numerous works in public spaces around the world.

Photo 2

Sotos Zachariadis created a drawing entitled “The Intellectual” for 2010 Fulbright Art Series. Born in Thessaloniki in 1960, he apprenticed in the studios of local painters. He first exhibited individually in Thessaloniki in 1984 and in Athens in 1985. Since then his work has been exhibited in Greece, Europe and the United States. In the 1980s, he was occupied with performance art which culminated with Echodraseis at the Royal Theater of Thessaloniki in 1989 while in the mid-1990s he organized the Art Village, an international art festival, in cooperation with foreign cultural institutes of his home town. Since 1983 he has been teaching, painting successively at the Eptapyrgion prison and the Psychiatric Hospital of Thessaloniki where he still lives and works. Zachariadis received a Fulbright Artist Award in 1993-1994 to work and study at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Photo 3

Alphabet is a limited edition double book that showcases a series of paper cut-out improvisations on the Greek and Latin alphabets by the artist Zoe Keramea, who was awarded a Fulbright artist scholarship in 1989-90, for independent research in printmaking in New York. Her work has been exhibited in numerous individual and group exhibitions in galleries and museums internationally.  Keramea’s work is in private collections, museums and has received several awards.