Book launch
SAVE THE DATE
December 14, 1–4pm
Glorya Kaufman Community Center at the Wende Museum
10808 Culver Boulevard,
Culver City, CA 90230
Join us at the Wende Museum for a celebration and commemoration of a historic artistic exchange. In 1982, Polish artists such as Tadeusz Kantor, Edward Krasiński and Henryk Stażewski donated their artworks to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA). Whereas artists based in Los Angeles, figures such as Lita Albuquerque, Frederick Eversley, Sam Francis, Helen Pashgian, Barbara Kasten and Liga Pang (among others), bequeathed their works to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, one of the world's oldest museums of modern and contemporary art.
December 14, 2024 1–4pm
The Glorya Kaufman Community Center at The Wende Museum
1pm Welcome by Agnieszka Pindera & Natalia Słaboń, Muzeum Sztuki
1:15pm Short documentary about Polish Collection at MOCA
1:45pm The 1982 Cultural Exchange
10–min. presentation by David Crowley
10–min. presentation by Michał Libera
10–min. presentation by Patryk P. Tomaszewski
10–min. presentation by Agnieszka Pindera
10–min. presentation by Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus
10–min. presentation by Natalia Słaboń
2:45pm Q&A
The publication The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles honors fifty artists who donated their artworks in what was a transatlantic museum exchange. What this book describes as a “Polish–American exchange” was in fact the initiative of a group of Warsaw-based artists who wanted to establish contact with their counterparts stateside. In the 1980s, the art scene in Poland, which was a Soviet satellite country, had its limitations, to say the least. Having said that, there were still exceptional places and people with the potential to make their mark on the broader art world. And so, the enterprise itself was based on the idea that Polish artists would offer their artworks to the newly established Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), whereas artists based in the United States would send their work, in turn, to be exhibited as part of Muzeum Sztuki’s collection.
Artworks were donated by the following artists: Stanisław Dróżdż, Zbigniew Gostomski, Lesław Janicki and Wacław Janicki, Zdzisław Jurkiewicz, Kōji Kamoji, Tadeusz Kantor, Edward Krasiński,
Andrzej Łobodziński, Tomasz Osiński, Maria Stangret, Antoni Starczewski, Henryk Stażewski, Zygmunt Targowski, Ryszard Winiarski, Lita Albuquerque, Peter Alexander, Terry Allen,
John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Laddie John Dill, Peter Downsbrough, Frederick Eversley, Jud Fine, Robbert Flick, Sam Francis, Joe Goode, Dan Graham, Douglas Huebler, Richard Jackson, Barbara Kasten, Les Levine, Gary Lloyd, Jay McCafferty, Ed Moses, Eric Orr, Liga Pang, Helen Pashgian, David Rabinowitch, Susan Rankaitis, Joel Shapiro, Paul Sharits, Peter Shelton, Peter Shire, Alexis Smith, Keith Sonnier, Michael Todd, DeWain Valentine and Paul Vangelisti.
Speakers’ bios:
David Crowley is Head of the School of Visual Culture and Head of Research at NCAD, Dublin. Prior to joining the College, he was a professor in the School of Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London, leading the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme there.
After studying as a design historian at the University of Brighton, the Royal College of Art and the Kraków Academy of Fine Art in the 1980s, David Crowley worked as a writer, critic and curator, as well as an academic. He has had a long-standing interest in visual culture.
As a curator, Crowley’s other major exhibitions include Cold War Modern at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2008–9 (co-curated with Jane Pavitt); The Power of Fantasy. Modern and Contemporary Art from Poland at BOZAR, Brussels, 2011 (with Zofia Machnicka and Andrzej Szczerski); Sounding the Body Electric. Experimental Art and Music in Eastern Europe at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012 and Calvert 22, London, 2013 (co-curated with Daniel Muzyczuk). The exhibition Notes from the Underground. Alternative Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1968-1994, continued his interest in the intersections of music and visual art. First mounted in Łódź, Poland, in autumn 2016, the show opened in Berlin in spring 2018 (also co-curated with Daniel Muzyczuk). His most recent show has been Henryk Stazewski. Late Style at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, (summer 2023), which explored the lives and influence of key members of the Polish avant-garde.
His authored books include National Style and Nation-State. Design in Poland (1992) and Warsaw (2003), and he is the editor – with Susan Reid – of three landmark volumes: Socialism and Style. Material Culture in Post-war Eastern Europe (2000); Socialist Spaces. Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (2003); and Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (2010). His book, Ultra Sounds. The Sonic Art of Polish Radio Experimental Studio was published in 2019.
In recent times, David Crowley has presented his research in talks at MoMA in NYC; Yale School of Architecture; The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow; Tate Modern in London; Tropenmuseum in Leiden; The Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, NYC; The Getty Centre in LA; ETH Zurich; the Catholic University of Santiago, Chile; the Venice Architecture Biennale; Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and elsewhere.
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For The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles, he wrote the text on Henryk Stażewski.
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Michał Libera is a sociologist working in sound and music since 2003. His involvement in producing and staging sound essays and other experimental forms of radio art and opera led him to collaborate with Martin Küchen, Hilary Jeffery, Pete Simonelli, Ralf Meinz, Komuna// Warszawa, Hilary Jeffery, Pete Simonelli, Apartment House and others. Libera is a producer with the conceptual pop label Populista, which is dedicated to the mis- and over- interpretation of music, and which has looked to reinterpret music from the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (Bôłt Records).
He has curated various concerts, festivals and anti-festivals, to include music programs for exhibitions, receiving an honorary mention at 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. Other regular collaborators include National Art Gallery Zachęta, the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the Polish National Museum (Królikarnia), Galerie West in The Hague, and Satelita in Berlin.
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He was not a contributor to the volume but will be speaking on the practice of Andrzej Łobodziński, focusing on his involvement in sound projects.
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Patryk P. Tomaszewski is a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His research encompasses global twentieth-century realisms, art under totalitarian regimes, and the histories of exhibitions in Europe and the United States during the Cold War. His dissertation offers the first scholarly examination of state-sponsored exhibitions of art and visual culture in early communist Poland (1945–56).
Tomaszewski’s writings have appeared in ARTMargins Online and The Museum of Modern Art’s post notes on art in a global context, among other publications. Most recently, he contributed to an edited scholarly volume, The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles (2024), published by Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. He previously served as a Mellon Humanities Alliance Teaching Fellow at LaGuardia Community College (2017-2019). His research has been supported by grants from the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York, CUNY Graduate Center, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
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For The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles he wrote the essay on Tadeusz Kantor.
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Agnieszka Pindera is the Director of the Zachęta–National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. She is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies at the Doctoral School of Humanities, the University of Warsaw. She held the position of the Head of Research Center at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź from 2016 and 2023. Pindera is interested in the organization of art institutions, including grassroot and independent initiatives. Her editorial projects include The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles (2024), Please Go On. The Social History of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2022), and
The Avant-garde Museum (2020). She has co-curated the exhibitions of Nikita Kadan (with Alona Karavai and Anna Potiomkina), Jasmina Cibic, and Konrad Smoleński (with Daniel Muzyczuk), as well as group shows, such as Blue for Distinction, Red for Correction (Christine König Galerie, Vienna 2023), and Peer-to-Peer. Collective Practices in New Art (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź. 2018).
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Agnieszka Pindera is the editor of The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles, and author of the essay reconstructing the geopolitical and personal contexts that contributed to the final shape of the exchange.
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Karolina Łabowicz-Dymanus is an art historian and Head of the Department of 20th and 21st Century Visual Arts Documentation at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Her research interests include the methods of Alter-Globalist Art History and modernization processes in the 1950s and the 1990s. Her publications include the book Synchronised over Network. Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts – four models: Budapest, Kyiv, Tallinn, Warsaw (2016, in Polish) and articles: “Normative Practice and “Tradition Management” in the Polish Art and History of Art of the 1950s” (in: A Socialist Realist History?: Writing Art History in the Post-War Decades, 2019) and The Corporate and Market Strategies for Contemporary Art in Eastern Europe in the 1990s (Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia, 2019). She is currently working on the project Global contacts of the Polish People’s Republic: An artistic exchange between Socialist Poland and Socialist Asia in the 1950s.
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For The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles she wrote the text on cultural policies in Socialist Poland; and from that perspective discussed the history of the Foksal Gallery.
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Natalia Słaboń is a researcher at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź and a Ph.D. candidate in cultural studies at the University of Łódź. She is currently working on the securing of funding for the Ryszard Stanisławski Papers.
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She was part of the editorial team for The 1982 Cultural Exchange Between Łódź and Los Angeles
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You can purchase this publication ONLINE.
Échange entre artistes 1931–1982, Pologne-USA: the Polish-American Artistic Exchange carried out in cooperation with The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and in cooperation with the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland under the Inspiring Culture program
