Onassis Cultural Center: Art Exhibitions
Current and Upcoming Events
Currently there are no art exhibitions at the Onassis Cultural Center.
UPCOMING MAJOR ART EXHIBITION
December 10, 2008–May 9, 2009
“Worshiping Women: Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens”
Statue of the Goddess Artemis. (ca. 100 B.C.). Parian marble. From Delos (found in the so-called House of the Diadoumenos). Athens, National Archaeological Museum, 1829.
Curated by Dr. Nikos Kaltsas, Director of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece; and Dr. Alan Shapiro, Professor of Classics and Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University, this exhibition explores, through more than 150 archaeological objects, the manifold ways in which women’s religious worship contributed not only to personal fulfillment but also to the civic identity of the leading city of the Classical Greek world.
The first section of the exhibition introduces the principal female deities of Athens and Attica, in whose cults and festivals women were most actively engaged: Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Demeter, and her daughter, Persephone. Between goddesses and mortals was a small group of heroines—explored in the next section—women who were believed to have lived in the distant past and who after their deaths became figures of cult worship. Next, the exhibition enters the world of priestesses, both historical and mythological, and looks at their visual iconography by focusing on their principal attribute, the large temple key. Several kinds of ritual acts, some that apply universally to all cults and others that were specific to the worship of a particular divinity, are presented in the next section. The exhibition closes with the life-cycle of Athenian women from birth to death, highlighting certain key moments of transition and the role of ritual in each of these.
The exhibition, through the study of religion, seeks to correct the unremittingly bleak picture that the lives of Athenian women were highly restricted when it came to the public sphere and participation in the political process. The involvement of women in cults and festivals, whether alongside men or separate from them, was as essential for the successful functioning of the polis as that of any member of society.
“Worshiping Women” brings together objects from the National Archaeological Museum of Greece; the archaeological museums of Pireus, Eleusis, Kerameikos, Argos, Thebes, Vrauron, Ancient Agora, the Akropolis Museum, the Epigraphical Museum, and the Benaki museum, as well as the First, Second, and Third Ephorates of Antiquities and the Antikensammlung Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; the Bibliothèque nationale de France; the Bibliothèque royale de Belgique; The British Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Musée du Louvre, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Archaeological Museum of Ferrara; the State Hermitage Museum; the Vatican Museums; Universität Bonn; and University of Newcastle.
Past Events
To learn about art events previously hosted by the Onassis Foundation please visit the Past Activities section on this site.