Greek Gotham

“Greek Gotham” aims to draw parallels between the Ancient and Classical Greek Civilization and New York City as it is today.

The group show, “Greek Gotham,” at Marina Vranopoulou’s year-old space, Dio Horia brings together 16 of New York’s most of-the-moment artists — among them Nina Chanel Abney, KAWS and Erik Parker. It was conceived by the New York-based art consultant Maria Brito, who is taking on the role of curator for the first time.

While Mykonos is known as a tourist destination, Dio Horia is putting the island, the most visited in the country, on the cultural map. “Greek Gotham” is an important, and ambitious, aesthetic moment for Mykonos: it’s the first time that only New York City-based artists are being shown in Greece. About half of them produced original work for the show, and a few — Taylor McKimens, Mira Dancy and Austin Lee — will come to Mykonos during its course.

Each of the artists whose work is on view in “Greek Gotham” was tasked with portraying, in some way, an interpretation of a Greek word. “Iconography” is represented, for example, by the recognizable color scheme and crossed-out eye imagery of KAWS. And Brito points to another pairing as particularly powerful: “In the case of Nina Chanel Abney, she wanted to be paired with ‘democracy,’ which the Greeks invented,” Brito says. “She is an African-American woman trying to convey the idea that we can all be equal.”