Faces of the Hero: From New York to Athens 

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) present Faces of the Hero, a transatlantic visual arts exhibition featured simultaneously in both New York City and Athens, the inaugural collaboration of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation-Lincoln Center (SNF-LC) Agora Initiative.  

This year marks the bicentennial of the liberation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire in 1821, as well as other significant political revolutions including the post-colonial independence of Mexico, Central America and Peru. In addition, shockwaves brought on by our current COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement also have made this a particularly urgent moment to reconsider what constitutes “heroism” in people’s personal lives as well as in their social and historical imaginations.  

Through an open call, students in New York and Athens were invited to submit works interpreting heroic figures or facets of heroism from antiquity until the present day. Displayed in this outdoor gallery are works by 10 multidisciplinary students from Parsons School of Design/The New School and 10 students from Athens School of Fine Arts, selected by an international jury. 

Featured artists: Arpi Adamyan, Christos Adonopoulos, Konstantina Barbari-Beka, Kevin Quilles Bonilla, Layo Bright, Dimitrios Chita, Nicole Economides, Caroline Garcia, Santo Jacobsson, Paulina Kim Joo, Niovi Kafantari, Josephine Lee, Eleftheria Papadouraki, Liana Eleni Papaleksi, Kalliroi-Eleni Papadopoulou, Anna Papadopoulou, Despina Pavlidou, Panagiota Stilianidou, Chuyi Sun, Isaiah Winters. 

Jurors: Julia Foulkes (Professor of History, The New School), George Kazazis (Professor, Athens School of Fine Arts), Lydia Matthews (Professor of Visual Culture, Parsons/The New School), Maria Veronica San Martin (Multidisciplinary artist/educator at the Center for Book Arts, NYC), Nikos Tranos (Rector, Athens School of Fine Arts), Gabriella Triantafyllis (Director of Programming and Production, SNFCC).

The project is made possible by the generous support of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), as part of the SNF-LC Agora Initiative, a collaboration that reimagines and reactivates public spaces for a new era through international “Twin Agoras” at Lincoln Center and the SNFCC.