Today, we’d like to introduce you to Dimitra Skandali. Dimitra was introduced to us by the brilliant and talented Alison Woods.
Dimitra, thank you so much for joining us today. We’d love for you to bring our readers up to speed – can you introduce yourself and share your story?
It is a great honor and with great pleasure, I will share my story with you and thank you for this opportunity! I am thankful to my friend Alison for connecting us.
I am a multimedia artist living and working on the Cycladic island of Paros in the Aegean Sea in Greece. I was born and raised in Alyki, a small village in the south west of Paros. Growing up in Alyki has shaped the way I see the world.
I was exposed to very few cultural events until my late twenties. My own attraction for the arts appeared relatively late in my life. I had never taken art classes in school. Ι studied Business Administration and worked for 11 years in the business field. After I discovered that there is something deeper in the arts during my first drawing lessons in the Aegean Center for the Arts on Paros, I made some very brave decisions about my life -especially because of the small village I was living in and because I was a woman: I was supposed to have a family, where was I going…. My thirst to discover new worlds, expand my horizons and acquire new skills in the arts lead me to pursue my first degree in Painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts in 2010, attend a year-long exchange program in HKU Utrecht, the Netherlands in 2009, and pursue my Masters of Fine Arts in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute in 2013. At SFAI, I felt I am home far away from home. The community of the school, my teachers and colleagues felt like the protected environment where I re-discovered myself and found my artistic voice; the same happened after I graduated with the Bay Area community and I am thankful for the people I met during all these years, for the exhibition opportunities which developed and grew my art carrier and practice even though the living situation in SF was extremely difficult as we all know. I was working as a multimedia artist in the United States and on Paros, from 2011 until 2019. When I came back to Paros in 2019, I was planning to return in the USA after six months, in March 2020. I had already moved to LA with a very busy schedule of exhibitions and artist-in-residency plans there and with a new community waiting for me. Thanks to my friendship with Alison Woods, who was the reason I felt welcomed in the new art scene and through her, I met all these amazing people in LA. With Covid, I stayed on the island and, with the support of my family, we were able to finalize the residency complex building, which had started many years before but was going with very slow progress. To set up the residency program was the next step and Alison Woods, Max Presneill, Tony Maridakis, Sandra Osborne, Holly Blake, Katie Hood Morgan, Heidi Quante, Katya Min, Donna Napper, and Kostas Prapoglou among others were a huge help for me. Most of them are in the Cycladic Arts Advisory and Selection committees or we have formed collaborative ideas with the Cycladic Arts. I am truly honoured for their support since the very first moment.
Specifically, the members of the Cycladic Arts Advisory Committee are the following: Katie Hood Morgan, an independent curator and cultural producer based in New York’s Hudson Valley, and recently the Interim Chief Curator and Deputy Director of the Hunter College Art Galleries in New York; Holly Blake, the Senior Residency manager of The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, California; Heidi Quante, a Bay Area Interdisciplinary Artist & Arts Fundraiser; Camilla Boemio, a Rome based, an AICA International Art Critics member and The AAC Platform Co-Founder, writer, Associate curator at Pera + Flora + Fauna, an official Collateral Event at the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia; and Dr Kostas Prapoglou, an Athens and London based, archaeologist-architect, contemporary art critic, curator and founder of Artefact Athens. The Cycladic Arts curatorial/selection committee which has been selecting the applicants are: Donna Enad Napper, a Bay Area based independent curator and art consultant; Katya Min, an independent curator and currently co-director of See(d) Artist Series, formerly the curator of Room for Big Ideas and Converge series at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA, and Alison Woods, a Los Angeles based contemporary painter and independent curator.
My dream during all the years has been to bridge the disparate worlds I have lived in, bringing together creative people from different parts of the world to create a safe haven for artists to connect and interact so that people of all ages on the island of Paros –especially young kids- will never feel the limitations I experienced in my youth. The idea to create an artist in residency program came to me when I first had residency experiences myself after my graduation from SFAI. I was going from one residency program to another and I was thrilled to see that there is such a situation where the artists were welcomed and had all the time to only focus on their art without destructions! It was a magical discovery! So, with the Cycladic Arts Program, my dream is to facilitate a dialogue between the International and Greek artist communities and to help put Paros in the global contemporary art scene. The Cycladic Arts Program became the vehicle for such a dream-to-be-true which brings my community together without me having to constantly travel; even though it is vital to keep my exhibition opportunities open in the United States and around the world.
Please talk to us about your creative work and career. What should we know?
As I mentioned above, I grew up in a small village, Alyki, southwest of Paros. Being in Cyclades has marked me: love for beauty; respect to human scale and the landscape; serene and paradise like views; natural beauty in every season of the year, in every moment; hidden paradises; kind people full of love; hospitality; open hearts and houses willing to share everything with the visitors; thirst for the new. At the same a sense of limitation; open and at the same time closed horizons; loneliness for most of the time during the year but overwhelmed with the touristic crowds during the summer; people full of love but with a sense that you need to have their approval (depending on the character, of course). All the above have left an imprint of a very fragile balance between the limits. In my work, I constantly talk about the fragility of balances. The use of natural materials calls for our re-appreciation to natural beauty and the ecological disasters we are facing. It calls for our attention to protect the natural world. The use of tradition (crocheting, weaving, embroidering the seagrass with other unexpected materials) calls to the need to know and re-appreciate where we come from; to understand our roots and feel more grounded. But at the same time, to go beyond that. To be innovators. To mark our own paths. The use of materials like seagrass from the Pacific Ocean and the Aegean and the combination of them with other found materials from my travels symbolise the interconnectedness between places and people around the world no matter our differences. Also, using seagrasses and making nets calls back to my love to the sea and to images of fishermen mending their fishing nets in my childhood. Using traditional techniques also takes me to memories with the older women when they did traditional pieces for their homes and their beloved ones. Their own ways to show their love to them. Summing up, my site-specific installations have references to the increasing environmental dangers as well as the unstoppable movement of humans and the agony of finding personal identity. Natural and manmade materials, found trash and all kinds of threads create ethereal forms using traditional ways. Fragility of nature, circle of life, and the interconnectedness of us all and with nature are very important threads that connect my art practice. I studied in Greece (ASFA, 2006-2010) and the Netherlands (HKU, with the Erasmus-Socrates exchange programme 2008-2009) before arriving in California where I completed my Masters degree in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute (2011-2013). I have won numerous awards and participated in nine artist residency programmes in the United States. I have held 18 solo and four two-person shows in the United States and Greece and my work has been presented in 68 group exhibitions worldwide while I have curated and co-curated five group exhibitions in Greece and the United States. I live and work on Paros island, in the Aegean Sea, in Greece.
Alison Woods has been a great friend to us and I know you’ve got a great relationship as well. Maybe you can tell our audience a bit about Alison and your experience with them.
I met Alison Woods in her graduation show at SFAI in 2012. She graduated one year before me. I was so impressed with her meticulous and large-scale paintings, you can’t imagine!!! One year later, I heard she created an invitational residency at her new place in LA. I contacted our common friend, Nancy Ivanhoe, another amazing artist, to connect us so that I would go and create a site-specific piece over there and get a sense of the LA art scene. The response was immediate and very enthusiastic from Alison! My experience on that first time of living and working with her was the beginning of our friendship. We kept in touch and I travelled often after that to hang out with her and to visit museums and galleries in LA. I did a second residency at the Bridge Residency when I moved in LA in 2019 and when she offered me to stay at her room until I settle down and find a job and my own way in the new city. It was a big relief for me. Hers and her husband’s support was very touching and I am always thankful!
In 2018, it was an incredible year for us both and what we did together sealed an amazing collaboration and the seed to create more opportunities for artist exchanges between the United States and Greece:
Among other things that my visa (O-1, for individuals with extraordinary abilities) required from me to stay in the USA were contracts for future projects. I contacted Alison in 2017 to see if we had any possibility of something like that during the years 2017-2020. At that time, she was part of Durden and Ray artist collective and she discussed about it with the team. The team, including Max Presneill, an incredible person, artist and curator and the director of Torrance Art Museum, who has been a lead person in their decisions was very enthusiastic with the idea of co-curating an exchange exhibition in their gallery in LA and in Paros. It happened! Our shows in both places were magical! The one in Los Angeles was held in June of 2018 and included 6 Greek and 6 American artists entitled In The Stillness Between Two Waves of the Sea at Durden and Ray, – listed as one of the memorable art events of 2018 by L.A. Art and Cake Art Magazine. The one on Paros, in September 2018, included 10 Greek and
13 American artists entitled A Heap of Broken Images Where the Sun Beats, at The Aegean Center for the Arts. Both shows were received with incredible success: we had reviews in both places, in the US and in Greece, and artists were very happy to show in both places. We were both extremely happy and felt like we found (another) common ground to do more things together! I was working since 2017 on the idea of creating a residency program on Paros and this was a moment I felt that this Program could be the frame for building a dialogue between both places and for future projects like those. During my time in LA in 2019 and immediately after I was able to travel again after Covid in 2021, Alison and myself were constantly working on setting up the website of Cycladic Arts and figuring out all the details I should take under consideration. Many people have helped and supported me on this from the beginning the idea of the residency as I mentioned previously. Alison was one of them, but the one with whom I finalised the online presentation of the program, where everything started. She has always been a force, an incredibly capable person in whatever she has been doing.
The Cycladic Arts program was launched during the summer of 2022 with an exhibition curated by dr Kostas Prapoglou including five Greek, American and American/Cuban artists in order to keep this kind of dialogue between artists from different backgrounds. At the same time, I invited artists friends and curators to test my idea of living and working on site. The open call went out in the fall of 2022 and the first official artists, musicians, curators, poets and writers began coming in April 2022. In July 2023, we had our second group exhibition and collaboration with the Artiatx, an artist collective based in Bilbao Spain, so we had one more dialogue between two Spanish and three Greek artists. During these days, in August and September 2023, we have our third group exhibition with two Greek artists and three European artists (one based in NY), curated by Jurriaan Benschop, a Dutch curator based in Berlin and Athens. Moreover, within the Cycladic Arts exchange approach, collaborations with museums and
institutions around the world are cultivated in support of its vision: Torrance Art Museum has been the first one to support this idea facilitating the necessary steps to select one artist from Southern California each year and send them to Cycladic Arts with paid flight fair and the residency cost. The same with AAC Platform, based in Rome, who is sending one artist/writer/poet from Italy every year. I am so very happy to share that we already had, in June 2023, one poet from Italy, sent by the AAC Platform, and we will have the first Southern Californian artist that TAM is sending in September 2023. We are in a dialogue with
more museums, institutions and universities like UC Berkeley, to create more opportunities like these for foreign and Greek artists for the future.
I feel incredibly happy to have such project realised! I still can’t believe it!
Website: dimitraskandali.com
Instagram: @dimskandali || @cycladicarts
Linkedin: Dimitra Skandali
Facebook: Dimitra Skandali, multimedia artist || Cycladic Arts
Other: vimeo: Dimitra Skandali
Image Credits
Elisabeth Ajtay, Marie-Luise Klotz, Robert Divers Herrick, Konstantinos Mavris, Kathimerini newspaper, Victoria Heilweil, Stephanos Georgiadis
