NEWS

Athens (March 3, 2008) -- Glenn Lowry, Director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, will visit Greece for the first time and will speak to public audiences in Athens and Thessaloniki as part of the “Great Ideas” series.

The Board of Directors of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation has selected the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (http://www.rpbw.com), a world-renowned architectural firm, to design the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, which will include new state-of-the-art facilities for the Greek National Opera and the National Library of Greece, set within an Educational and Cultural Park. The public site for these three projects is near the center of Athens, Greece, adjacent to the sea, covering an approximate area of 42 acres (17 hectares, 170,000 m2).

From October 18-21, the Kids’ Guernica exhibition will be hosted at Zappeion-Athens. The exhibition has been cofunded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Kids’ Guernica is a worldwide movement, initiated in Greece by the poiein kai prattein (to create and to do) not-for-profit-organization, in which children around the world create peace paintings on large-scale canvases the same size as that of Pablo Picasso/s Guernica.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is proud to sponsor the exhibition Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, which is to open October 22 at the Megaron Plus. The major body of work in the exhibition is on loan from the Leopold Museum in Vienna.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is the sole supporter of the “Topoi” exhibition (Places), which displays selected works of Greek and international painters. The artifacts are from the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and are displayed in a thematic series, topoi. The exhibition will run from September 26 through November 25 in Athens, while in Thessaloniki, photos and engravings of the Museum’s permanent collections will be displayed.

For the fourth consecutive year, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation is supporting the Spartathlon race, which will be run by 385 male and female athletes from around the world. This year is the 25th anniversary of the reenactment of the historic marathon, which was initiated by John Fodden 25 years ago. This year’s race will begin from the Propylaia, on Friday, September 28, at 07:00, and will finish at Sparta on Saturday, September 29 around 19:00.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation has been accepted as a funding member of the European Foundation Centre. The European Foundation Centre (EFC) is an international association of foundations and corporate funders whose mission is to promote collaboration among foundations and to advance philanthropy in Europe and beyond.

The fifth Soccer Academy Tournament will start June 18th at the Herakleion, Crete. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation has announced that it will fund the Soccer Academy Tournament for the third consecutive year. The Foundation is the sole supporter of the Tournament.