Elaine Angelopoulos
Across a Polarized Divide

I am an artist who has lived and worked in New York City for four decades, enmeshed into a multicultural dynamic of ideas, people, and perceptions. Art provides me an in-between space to realize a sensation or ideal that dwells within my intuition. In this sphere of art, there is cause for celebration and a need for transcendence. I work in various methods of art production to connect divergent experiences and cultural orientations tied to my autobiography. My projects combine painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, new media, and architecture. I interact with the public through seeing, talking, walking, singing and dancing as performance art, inspired by urban ethnography, ecology, and politics. Art takes you out of your rat race and up a ladder to somewhere else.

As I’ve met kindred spirits amongst other Greek Americans and Greeks in various social circles, we connect the dots in our dialogue on collective memory, physical archives, and their significance to us. Prior to my time in New York, from 1965 into the 1980s, I was immersed in Greek culture through my family. Language, social gatherings, Orthodox Christian practices, and culinary delights thrived within a tight-knit community in Worcester, Massachusetts. Greek customs reverberated with American life, unraveled, and reintegrated itself through internal family shifts, friends, and the social dynamics within the greater community. Community members preserved their memories of their villages in Epirus through oral storytelling, literature, and photographs. Their elders and relatives experienced war firsthand resulting to permanent emotional scars and geopolitical divisions. I was deeply engaged with their music, folklore, and world views. I observed their social rituals.

During my college years at Pratt for Art and Design, I befriended students from Greece. Our differences sparked a curiosity in me to understand the complexity between us. The term “Colonialism” at the time seemed elusive, but eventually, I learned how it defined economic global power on Greece’s government. Faced with my own definition of success, I carved out a path into various directions of self-education. My conviction sought out art and ideas that challenged the Western lens and continuously discovered the shifts and gaps of our diaspora in a broadened, inclusive scope.

As my relatives believe that cultural preservation is critical, I feel that many experiences of Greek American life remain unseen and unheard. Single Greek American mothers in the 1970s is one example. Greek Americans in uncommon occupations or trades and Greek American views about desegregation are a few more among many. As an artist who has been dedicated to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, I am also inextricably tied to my Greek roots. My art and life bridge across a main polarized divide in my life, namely between the traditional expectations of my cultural origins and a vast range of marginalized individuals—biracial, an ethnic blend, queer, feminist, divorced, or otherwise.

I am not a stranger to other kinds of polarizations, class-related for example, as early on I was economically self-reliant. Later in my life, my employment in a notable contemporary art gallery helped me understand the professional life of artists in the marketplace and institutions. My colleagues were from a myriad of countries and diasporas, with their own versions of successful narratives and fractured paths. Safely perched behind a white cube—our art world—we collaborated with artists, curators, researchers, institutions, collectors, and dealers from around the globe. I felt a particular connection to Soviet émigrés, classically trained in studio practices, and well versed in ancient Greek mythology. The content in their artwork revealed fractures of a social reality and political authoritarian threat. Their interpretation of Cold War history revealed to me unsaid rifts within the Greek America. If Greek American families, for example, had leftist or right-wing relatives in Greece, how did they negotiate this during the cold war period? How did the corresponding political affiliations affect their responses to the counter-culture movement in America? This is among a host of questions buried deep in family and community archives.

My work life at the gallery and my volunteer work as a documentarian in activist groups provided me insight into democracy in action. Photography and video became dominant visual mediums to track my experiences in New York and Washington D.C. during the 1990s, onward. As I attended public protests about the neglect of the AIDS pandemic, gender-based phobia, violence, and war, I imagined the fervor of the student protests in Greece from the 1970s to overthrow the dictatorship.

As I retreated into the studio, my abstract visual language transformed into new forms and materials. Inspired by patterns from circle dances for Epirotic folk songs, Fluxus artists, and quantum physics, I invented a physical and organic weaving technique of rope and string into sculpture. Some works became columns while others became very entangled, bodacious forms. Intricate forms ranged from hand-held stand-alone spheres to large-scale webs that suspended from ceilings and roof rafters. Persephone and Ariadne are mythological figures often brought to my attention, intrinsic to social roles and woven memories. Entanglements became a diagram to integrate the divergent parts of my life experiences, collective memory, personal narratives, and great events that reveal a multicultural, dynamic life.

My graduate thesis, The Nested Self, is a “Theater of Self” based on the idea that the “I” is multiplied. Focused on a matrilineal lineage, I wove stories and visual references through constructed moments as performance from site-specific actions and costumes. I created five personas that present different narratives conjured from my ancestry, people and cultures I’ve connected with as an ongoing project. This approach uniquely enlivens the various legacies that I will preserve for future generations. I view this work as integral to my current art process that calls for the unique complexity we carry within ourselves.

In negotiating polarized divides, art heals to create a space that accommodates betweenness, curiosity, intrigue, and change. Greek American artists who practice unconventional work most often feel isolated in relation to their ethnic community. Being seen as a cultural threat, they are ostracized, resulting to emotional conflicts and a loss of financial support. Visionaries across the Greek American diaspora ought to foster a more open culture that celebrates the diversity we Greek Americans have been engaged with. Acknowledgment and support of those Others of Greek America will contribute to a greater understanding and strengthen bonds between us.

January 27, 2026

Elaine Angelopoulos lives and works in New York City. Her artworks and projects have been exhibited in New York, the United States, and Europe. Angelopoulos received a Franklin Furnace Fund/Jerome Fellowship in 2014/15. Currently, Angelopoulos is in “Performance, Activist, and Existential Photographs,” a group exhibition on Art and Politics at Ronald Feldman Gallery, curated by Marco Nocella.