Houston artist launches COVID-19 memorial project
In the beginning, meaning the beginning of pandemic time, artist Joni Zavitsanos gathered names and pictures of Houstonians who died from COVID-19 because it just seemed like a good thing to do. Her work often contains memorial elements. She envisioned building a large display wall of small portraits.
“Then it hit close to home,” she says.
Her brother contracted the virus. He slept a lot and mostly suffered fatique, but a friend of Zavitsanos’ who has a compromised immune system also tested positive. She has been in an overflow unit at M.D. Anderson hospital since early June. The friend pulled through after weeks in critical condition and on a ventilator, but she remains hospitalized. “It will be a long haul for her … because of the after-effects of this terrible sickness,” Zavitsanos says. “I did not want her on my wall.”
When she began the project in March, tracking down subjects was harder. “Now it is as if the floodgates have opened, and I can barely keep up with depicting the numbers of lives lost,” Zavitsanos says.
She wants to install her wall in a public space to pay homage to as many victims of the coronavirus as possible. The display would combine her small portraits with commemorative wreaths made by her friend Karen Weimmer that will have molded leaves with hand-written names. Zavitsanos plans to unveil the wall during a memorial service for all of her subjects when that is possible again, and she hopes it will be permanent.
She hasn’t yet landed on a location for the project, but in the meantime, the studio upstairs in her Memorial-area home is filling up. Her memorial has turned into a massive labor of love.
To date, Zavitsanos has collected 110 names and pictures — “just a snippet,” she acknowledges, since more than 800 Houstonarea residents have died. “Each and every one has a name and a story. They are of every race, every skin color, every socioeconomic background, every age,” she says. “They are fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles, children and grandparents. They are first responders, priests, pastors, deacons, activists and political leaders. Some are from nursing homes and prisons and halfway houses … Not all people are treated with dignity and respect.”
Painting in the Byzantine
Greek icon style she learned from her father, Zavitsanos depicts people with gold leaf halos to signify that they have died. “In Greek culture, very much like Hispanic and Jewish culture, we honor our dead,” she says. “We go to great lengths to make sure they are remembered. And I kept thinking about all these people dying alone and with no funerals in the usual sense.”
Byzantine icons originated in the 1st century. As Zavitsanos’ website explains, the early paintings were textbooks for teaching Christianity but also were considered a “spiritual gateway,” a medium for the faithful to establish communication with the sacred. Many iconographers still adhere to the same, highly disciplined technique. They don’t develop personal artistic styles by choice, seeing that as a distraction from their intended spiritual purpose.
Zavitsanos’ father, Diamantis J. Cassis, saw things differently. His paintings are contemporary art infused with spiritual meaning. Zavitsanos left her job as a teacher at Annunciation Greek Orthodox School a few years ago to care for the ailing Cassis, then picked up his mantle after he died in 2015. “I strive to explore the questions, can the sacred be translated into the secular, and how would that look?” she says.
Her mixed-media paintings, which incorporate layers of collage and wood block printing, are lively pieces that convey biblical stories with contemporary figures. Though they contain moral and spiritual lessons, they also are quirky.
Zavitsanos appreciates irony and humor. Her painting “Wedding at Cana” has a collaged “hand of god’” coming in from a corner — and as the artist explains on her website, she took the hand from a picture of President Barack Obama. “The Good Shepherd” depicts Christ as a rock star. The couple depicted in “Waking Up & Starting Over” have their innermost thoughts “tattooed” across their skin.
With the sheer volume of her pandemic project, the COVID-19 icons are simpler. She starts each one by affixing a photograph to an 8-by-8-inch wood block, leaving the faces to speak for themselves but surrounding them with paint and gold halos. “We are all saints — that’s kind of the idea,” she says.
They all will be combined to form a grid, with rows maybe 25 blocks across.
“It could be hung as it is today,” Zavitsanos says. “But people are still dying. I want it to be as full as it needs to be.”