International artist Joni Zavitsanos’ triumphant exhibit “Village Saints” on the Greek island of Lefkada this summer is moving first to New York City and then to the Boston area.
Accompanied by the poetry of her collaborator Deanna Benjamin, the presentation focuses on the faces and stories of the people of Lefkada, where Ms. Zavitsanos’ husband John was born and where the couple spends their summers.
A review by Christina Michala for Lefkada News, translated from Greek to English, notes: “Joni Zavitsanos began this journey more than a decade ago. She did not come to Lefkada to paint landscapes, beaches, or sunsets. She chose something far more difficult: people. And it is deeply moving that an artist who lives thousands of miles away found, in the people of the island, the material for a profoundly human narrative.”
Ms. Zavitsanos began sketching the people she befriended on the island. When she read a poem by her friend Ms. Benjamin, she was so moved she suggested the collaboration.
“What started as sketches to document the village and pass summer afternoons became a sort of calling to record not only the villagers’ likenesses but also their experiences, their stories,” said Ms. Zavitsanos told a WashU Continuing & Professional Studies news reporter. Ms. Benjamin, who is an instructor at Washington University in St. Louis, made those stories the foundation for her poetry. Her poetry collection, Blue Ionia and Other Poems will be published by Finishing Line Press in August.
The exhibition is called “Village Saints,” Ms. Michala wrote in her Lefkada News review, “because of the way Ms. Zavitsanos sees us all as saints.”
“It does not refer to the saints of the Church’s hagiographies. It refers to those people who, without ever realizing it, sanctify everyday life through the way they live, love, work, give, and stand beside others. The grandmother who held a family together. The old man who labored all his life,” Ms. Michala added.
“I am grateful for all the wonderful people who have enjoyed my work and seen the many faces that make up this beautiful island of Lefkada, my home away from home,” said Ms. Zavitsanos.
Ms. Michala was struck by the eyes of the people in the portraits.
“Looking at the figures, one is immediately struck by their scale. Their large size allows the gaze, the wrinkles, and the smallest details to speak with remarkable intensity. It is not the body that is enlarged. It is the human presence,” she wrote.
“Those gazes that look toward us—but not quite at us. As though they exist simultaneously in two worlds: the present and memory. . . . As though they are still thinking. Remembering. Carrying on a silent conversation with their own lives.”
The exhibit has closed in the Theodoros Stamos Exhibition Hall in Lefkada, Greece, and can be seen this fall to Fordham University’s Museum of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Art in New York and, in the spring of 2027, to the Maliotis Cultural Center in Brookline, MA.