Join Art Historian Magdalena Moskalewicz, for a presentation on the work of the internationally recognized artist, Magdalena Abakanowicz as well as her connection to Chicago.
Starting with the public art installation Agora in Chicago’s Grant Park (2006), this talk will look at both sculpture and textiles made by its author, the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), and her connection to the city. I will discuss Abakanowicz’s artistic lineage, which goes back to the expressive sculpture made in post-Stalinist Poland in the mid-1950s; the artist's highly original weavings of the 1960s and 1970s that revolutionized textile art; and the development of her particular style of public art in the 1980s-1990s, today installed in multiple cities around the world. I will examine this transition from the unusual, “private” hung soft sculpture to more traditional, public and large-scale figurative arrangements in the context of Abakanowicz’s developing artistic identity as a woman living and creating in Communist Poland.
Magdalena Moskalewicz, PhD, is an art historian, curator, and editor, who specializes in art from the former Eastern Europe from the early avant-gardes until today. Her academic research mostly focuses on the art of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, while her curatorial practice examines the postsocialist condition and its parallels with postcoloniality. She is a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches curatorial and critical museum studies as well as history of modern and contemporary art.
