Triada Samaras / Press: Greek‑American Women Artists Present “From the Finite to the Infinite” in New York

 

Above:  Photo of some of the artists featured in the exhibition

Greek‑American Women Artists Present “From the Finite to the Infinite” in New York

By

 Greek News

 -

 March 6, 2026

NEW YORK–

Amid an impressive turnout from the Omogenia and New York’s art community, the group exhibition “Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite: Hellenic‑American Women Artists” was inaugurated on Wednesday, March 4.

The Consulate’s event hall was filled with guests gathered to honor nineteen leading Greek-American female creators. Curated by Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos, the exhibition is held in celebration of International Women’s Day, serving as a tribute to the creative power of women within the Greek Diaspora.

The exhibition was inaugurated by the Consul General of Greece in New York, Ifigeneia Kanara, who praised the dynamic presence and contribution of women within the Greek-American community. “It is our honor to transform the Consulate into a vibrant platform for dialogue, where classical Greek thought meets contemporary artistic innovation through the perspective of women,” she remarked.

Consul General Kanara extended sincere thanks to the curator Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulou, and to the exhibition’s initiator, Antonia Papatzanaki, for their vision and contribution and congratulated the participating artists for their outstanding work.

Following the opening, the exhibition’s visionary, Antonia Papatzanaki, conveyed the message of curator Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos—who was unable to attend due to health reasons—praising the intellectual clarity and philosophical structure of the exhibition. Papatzanaki emphasized that the art of these women is not merely theoretical but a living process that redefines the boundaries of existence and creation. “This exhibition is not just about philosophy,” she noted. “It is about the woman artist navigating between defined form and absolute abstraction; it is about the continuity of generations and the infinite possibilities of the female artistic language today.”

The Philosophical Identity of the Exhibition

The exhibition’s title reflects a profound dialectic: on the one hand, Euclidean geometry represents measure, clarity, and the defined form characteristic of classical Greek thought. On the other hand, the concept of Infinite, as explored by Zeno of Elea, introduces philosophical rupture, flow, and the “Dionysian” power of becoming.

The nineteen artists, ranging in age from 29 to 83, inhabit and redefine this conceptual space, bridging the naturalistic with the abstract and the finite with the absolute. Visitors had the opportunity to explore works spanning a wide spectrum, from naturalism to geometric abstraction.

Participating artists include: Eozen Agopian, Elaine Angelopoulos, Laura Donson, Angie Drakopoulos, Morfy Gikas, Zoe Keramea, Artemis Kotioni, Eirini Linardaki, Despo Magoni, Nefeli Massia, Despina Myriokefalitaki-Zografos, Antonia Papatzanaki, Ioanna Pantazopoulou, Marita Pappa, Anna Samara, Triada Samaras, Dimitra Skandali, Lydia Venieri, Fotini Vurgaropoulou.

The exhibition will remain on view through March 31, at the Consulate General of Greece in New York [69 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075] Monday–Friday, 9:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m.

Link: https://tinyurl.com/25dtnzh2

Triada Samaras: Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite at the Greek Consulate in NYC

Above: Euclidian Web, Triada Samaras, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 inches

Above right: Greek Consul General Kanara (right) and Antonia Papatzanaki at the Opening Reception

Reflecting on a successful opening at the Consulate General of Greece in New York City:

It was an honor to celebrate the reception for "Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite: Hellenic American Women Artists" last Wednesday, March 4. This exhibition, honoring International Women’s Month, features the work of 19 Hellenic-American women artists exploring diverse narratives of heritage and identity.

My deepest gratitude to the curator and organizer for their vision in bringing this collection to life. It was a pleasure to engage with so many colleagues and guests in such a meaningful setting.

The exhibition remains on view through March 31, 2026. For those interested in viewing the digital catalogue and exhibition brochure, please visit my News page:

https://www.triadasamaras.com/news.html

#LinkedInArts #HellenicHeritage #InternationalWomensMonth #ContemporaryArt #ProfessionalPractice

Above: Euclidian Web, Triada Samaras, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 20 inches

Euclidian Web serves as a visual meditation on the tension between order and the unknown. Inspired by the exhibition’s focus on Hellenic philosophical roots, the painting utilizes linear intersections to map the finite boundaries of logic against the infinite nature of existence. The branch-like forms, created through a mindful, neurographic process, reference the organic growth patterns found in nature—mirroring both neural pathways and the sprawling networks of the physical world. In this work, the web is not a trap, but a connection; a map of the internal constraints we face and the vast, limitless space that exists once we move through them.

Above: Zeno's Horizon, Triada Samaras, 2025, Acrylic, oil crayon on canvas, 20 x 16 inches

Triada Samaras: Catalog Essay for Transcending Bodies by Patricia Miranda

Catalog Essay for Transcending Bodies

Photo Credit:  Paul Takeuchi

​Triada Samaras, Fragmented Exultations
Patricia Miranda

Triada Samaras- the artist and the work - is full of righteous fury. In Samaras’ world, epic narratives emerge from the intimacy of personal illness and bodily fragility. The exhibition, Transcending Bodies, includes paintings from several recent series. The Long Covid Series presents a lamentation on the isolation and resilience of negotiating chronic illness, especially one so fraught with political context. Her palette of blacks, smoky umbers, and dirty whites is applied in ferocious strokes of somber earthiness. An occasional dense cadmium red or yellow punches the space; this is a dusk world drained of fecund greenery. Hearts, hands, and torsos appear disembodied from swirls of shadow. They become iconic, body parts as talismanic ex-votos. They circle a vortex in the pictorial space as though falling backwards into oblivion, threatening to reach into our world to pull us with them. Their plea to not fall spills the inky black world onto the sides of the canvas, breaking the fourth wall of their interiority.

The Unbound Series continues the iconography of visceral brushwork and tumultuous emotions. Yet forms are no longer fragmented in inchoate darkness – hints of landscape appear, leaning closer into illusion. Figures have an earnest naivete; a body traced onto the canvas is swaddled in a surround of paint, symbolic houses swirl through a flooded subconscious storm dream. Clouds of loosely scripted poetry encircle the images like sirens recounting the story. Objects materialize, windswept, mythic, wrestling between the void and the luminous. 

In the Body and Nature Series, darkness has given way to a dawn of bright blues, pinks and yellows. The brushwork remains agitated, full of the struggle and longing present in all of the artist’s work. These sunrise landscapes are smaller, quieter, almost jubilant. A horizon appears across the series, gravity calming the vortex, as a hand reaches hopefully into the distant light.

The exhibition embodies a cycle of seasons, a woman’s private story of illness and healing.  There’s a persistent spirituality to Samaras’ work, a sense of the pain, awe, and transcendence of suffering, and the ability of paint to illuminate the visceral. Subsuming larger religious and societal themes into the particularity of a woman with an “unacceptable” chronic illness, her sense of atmosphere references Goya in his dark moody politic. The urgency of her touch and elasticity of her forms, as well as her tactile religiosity, bring to mind El Greco, the icon writer turned fleshy painter, perhaps an unconscious nod to her Greek heritage. Samaras exults in the expressive and tempestuous emotionality of paint.

Patricia Miranda July 2025

Triada Samaras: Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite: Hellenic- American Women Artists, Greek Consulate, NYC

 I am very pleased to announce I will have two of my paintings in this exhibition:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New York, N.Y. — The Consulate General of Greece in New York, in celebration of International Women’s Month, proudly presents the group exhibition Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite: Hellenic- American Women Artists, curated by Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos.

The exhibition will be on view from March 4–31, 2026, and will open with an RSVP reception on Wednesday, March 4, from 6:00–8:00 p.m.

RSVP here: https://events.humanitix.com/euclid-s-finite-to-zeno-s-infinite-hellenic-american-women-artists 

or use the QR code in the image below:

The artworks featured in this exhibition are stylistically varied, ranging from naturalistic to abstracted and geometric approaches, a diversity that gave rise to the title Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite. 

Euclid’s Elements articulate a conception of space grounded in finitude, measure, and formal containment, structured through points without magnitude, bounded lines, and circumscribed planes governed by axioms of proportionality and logical closure. This geometric order privileges clarity, presence, and tactile intelligibility over abstraction or infinity, resonating with the common characterization of the Classical Greek worldview as oriented toward the bounded body and the self-contained form. 

In contrast to this Apollonian logic of closed form and corporeal measure, Zeno of Elea’s reflections on the infinite introduce a decisive disturbance into the Greek confidence in finitude and stable identity. Zeno’s infinite functions as a philosophical rupture rather than an expansion of space, aligning with what Nietzsche later identifies as a Dionysian force of dissolution and becoming that destabilizes the principle of individuation.

Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite: Hellenic-American Women Artists proposes figuration and abstraction not as stylistic opposites, but as philosophically charged modalities through which the classical dialectic between measure and excess, stability and flux, is materially enacted.

Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos

Participating artists:

Eozen Agopian; Elaine Angelopoulos; Laura Donson; Angie Drakopoulos; Morfy Gikas; Zoe Keramea; Artemis Kotioni; Eirini Linardaki; Despo Magoni; Nefeli Massia; Despina Myriokefalitaki-Zografos; Antonia Papatzanaki; Ioanna Pantazopoulou; Marita Pappa; Anna Samara; Triada Samaras; Dimitra Skandali; Lydia Venieri; Fotini Vurgaropoulou.

For more information:

Please contact the curator, Thalia Vrachopoulos, at 646-344-9009 or tvrachopoulos@gmail.com, or the initiator of the exhibition, Antonia Papatzanaki, at 917-213-5949 or apapatza@yahoo.com.

Viewing Hours:

Monday–Friday, 10:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m.

Consulate General of Greece in New York

69 East 79th Street

New York, NY 10075

Triada Samaras and Exhibition at the Greek Consulate of NYC

Save the Date! I am pleased to announce that my paintings will be featured in a group exhibition called: "Euclid’s Finite to Zeno’s Infinite: Hellenic-American Women Artists" to be held at the Greek Consulate of New York. 

Details: Curator: Dr. Thalia Vrachopoulos, art historian, independent curator, and Professor of Visual Arts at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Venue: Greek Consulate of New York, 69 E 79th St, New York, NY 10075
Dates: March 4 – April 3
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 4, 2026

Above:  Zeno’s Horizon Triada Samaras 2025 

Acrylic on Panel (24" x 18") (detail)

Triada Samaras Poem: Light Land Looming

 Light Land Looming

​
Land in limitless light
Looms level with heaven,
Rewards us with reason--
Sprawling and safe.

A mountain emerges,
Spoiling serenity.,
Pointed lines draw our spellbound
Eyes uphill

To a cold place where
The wind blows without logic,
Up and down the peak
In excessive screams.

We do not resist,
But are lifted willingly
Toward the summit--
And our nightmares
​
Hypnotized, we grasp the
Needing automatically,
Perceiving the peril
As our own.

c. 2009 Triada Samaras (revised 2025)

For more poems please see my website

Triada Samaras Poem: Whispering Branches

Whispering Branches

When heavy words began to fall
Lightly down, from leaf to leaf 

They landed and dropped

When superfluous ones left
Their monotones faded and
Inflections stilled—
Leaving luxurious silence
Birdsong and the gentle wind

Took us back to a time
When our feet were soft
Walked a carpet of pine needles
Drank their fresh scent—

To a place where sound
Meant the waving branches up high,
Spirit’s gentle whisper
Blowing lush green breezes between them

That is when I felt your breath on my cheek 

The breeze blew through the spaces where we danced

While the sky twirled castanets

In an endless musical prose

That was when you found poetry
Half asleep in a pastoral dream next to me

That fell to your face
In a whisper of love
Like your breath on mine

As I wrote it all down

c. Triada Samaras 2002  (editied 2026)

For more poems please see my website

The Conundrum

The Conundrum

The artist groped through the paint 
Trying to see

With her fingertips 
The things she could not say

The more she could see 
The less she could say so

She spoke in whispers 
Even to her secret self

Asking, where does the paint 
Want to go?

The paint drifted about the canvas 
Like waves on a lazy boat

Lapping here 
Landing there

Landing nowhere 
In particular

The artist played
The game she learned long ago pretending

Her brush was deaf 
Her fingers mute

And the game of smiling 
When it was not called for

She stopped the brush 
To catch her breath often

Asking, where does the paint 
Want to be?

The more she could say 
The less she could see so

She spoke in whispers 
Blaming paint

Even to 
Her secret self.

c. 2007 Triada Samaras (revised 2025)

For more poems see my website

Triada Samaras Poem: The Speech

The Speech

I cannot say
which came first

my poem
or my political impulse

but I was supposed to make you
move your butt
that is all

I was supposed to make you
get up off your seat
and engage yourself
civically speaking

But no
you just sit there

Now my writer's block
is causing me
to doubt my democratic principles
or vice versa

because even if
all the good seats
were going to be taken
by all the fat cats
the men and women
in their greedy suits

And even if my poem
had no art
or my art no matter

The idea was to make you
move
like I can see you move
challenge
change
the way things are

But no
you just sit there

revealing the limitation
in my speech

So the art of democracy
is waning
and my poems
with it

For an art of change
must change
after all
or die

but tell me

did I stir you
when I read this poem?

Did you try to imagine
how many words
does it take
to change a thing?

Or what is the reason
for all the delay?

c. Triada Samaras 2009 (revised 2025)

For more poems see my website

Triada Samaras Poem: In the Kitchen

In the Kitchen

No hesitation in the way she did it
Splat!
with the silver spoon
she grabbed to crush his ugly body

Unexpected was the crunch
No seconds left
between her, the bug, the spoon
Splat!
no second chance, no mercy
for the nasty creature

No guilt or thought
no offense taken

He was a goner
shaking while she whacked him
with her metal spoon
Splat! Splat! Splat!
Dead again

No hesitation on his creepy insect shell
Crushed and flattened against the wall
Antennae and all

No smile but such focus
She slayed him with her hocus pocus!

Garbage in, garbage out
That was the way she did it.

c. Triada Samaras 2026

In the Kitchen

No hesitation
Splat!
Silver spoon
Crush his ugly body

Unexpected crunch
No seconds left
No mercy
Nasty creature

No guilt
No thought
He was a goner
Shaking
Splat! Splat! Splat!

No hesitation
Creepy insect shell
Crushed, flattened
Antennae and all

No smile
Such focus
She slayed him
Hocus pocus!

Garbage in, garbage out

That’s the way she did it

c. Triada Samaras 2026

For more poems see my website

Triada Samaras Poem: 5 or 6 P's

5 or 6 P’s

Piss poor progress

Places a premium on

Puttering

Not perfection

On passion, perseverance,

And pedagogy

Developed in lieu of

Probable possibility

Parties with Prozac

And Pinot Grigio

Promoting plump particles of pride

And pleasing the public

Puts power over paradox

And privilege over participation

Progress might placate

But perfection will polarize

The precarious prevalence

Of primitive panaceas

c. Triada Samaras  2015 ed. 2026

For more poems see my website

Triada Samaras Poem: Home

Home Is

Home is hearth
Home is window
Home is doors
Home is walls

Home is skin
Home is sin

Home is talk
Home is silence

Home is sanctuary
Home is prison

Home is spirit
Home is space

Home is secret
Home is caution
Home is red flag

Home is darkness
Home is light

Home is love
Home is safe
Home is not

Home is refrigerator
Home is enclosure

Home is endearing
Home is entrapment

Home is form
Home is shape

Home is light
Home is reflection
Home is deflection

Home is life
Home is dysfunction
Home is terror
Home is light

Home is cinnamon
Home is apples

Home is mold
Home is dust

Home is collected
Home is connected

Home is disarming
Home is alarming

Home is love
Home is war
Home is hope

Home is continent
Home is cake

Home is shouting
Home is money

Home is overrated
Home is underestimated

Home is total

Home is cigarettes
Home is the last puff
Home is the last word

Home is hearth Home is window Home is doors Home is walls Home is skin Home is sin Home is talk Home is silence Home is sanctuary Home is prison Home is spirit Home is space Home is secret Home is caution Home is red flag Home is darkness Home is light Home is love Home is safe Home is not Home is refrigerator Home is enclosure Home is endearing Home is entrapment Home is form Home is shape Home is reflection Home is deflection Home is life Home is dysfunction Home is terror Home is light Home is cinnamon Home is apples Home is mold Home is dust Home is collected Home is connected Home is disarming Home is alarming Home is love Home is war Home is hope Home is continent Home is cake Home is shouting Home is money Home is overrated Home is underestimated Home is total Home is cigarettes Home is the last puff Home is the last word.

c. Triada Samaras 2015 ed. 2025

For more poems see my website

Triada Samaras Poem: Light Land Looming

I'm gathering my poetry to document it all in one place. I'm finding poems I had forgotten I'd written from many years ago. I find myself so happy to be reading and rewriting them now.  This was written during a visit to the Rocky Mountains.

Light Land Looming
​
Land in limitless light
Looms level with heaven,
Rewards us with reason—
Sprawling and safe.

A mountain emerges,
Spoiling serenity.
Pointed lines draw our spellbound
Eyes uphill.

To a cold place where
The wind blows without logic,
Up and down the peak
In excessive screams.

We do not resist,
But are lifted willingly
Toward the summit—
And our nightmares.
​
Hypnotized, we grasp the
Needing automatically,
Perceiving the peril
As our own.

c. 2009 Triada Samaras (revised 2025)