66.1  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
Spring, 2009
Previous
Next
Polish American Studies

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 
 
 

Ethnic Aesthetics: Considering Polish-American Art

by

Ann Hetzel Gunkel

      The purpose of this article is twofold. First, the project considers Polish American contemporary artworks in the context of aesthetic philosophy. Secondly, it explores, by way of case studies, the work of two contemporary Polish American artists, William Grabowski and Katharine Henryka Schutta. Grabowski is a teacher in the Long Island Public Schools and adjunct professor at Hofstra University and the New York Institute of Technology. His mixed media heritage artworks challenge the problematic distinctions between art and craft that plague critical discourse in the fine arts. Schutta, a professor and assistant dean at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a cutting edge practitioner of contemporary collage. Her primary medium is collage, with exceptional work in printmaking and digital reproduction. Both of these widely exhibited artists raise provocative questions about ethnicity and identity, and more specifically encourage us to engage Polish American aesthetics in a way that offers insight into the problems of contemporary art and the problems of ethnic identity in the postmodern era. 1

 
Figure 1
    Image 1
    Transcultural Visions Exhibition Catalog (2001).
 
 
      Polish American scholars have done important work recovering and examining our largely unknown literary history.1 But the task of documenting and examining our other art forms largely has gone undone. One important and vital exception was the major 2001-02 exhibition, "Transcultural Visions: Polish American Contemporary Art" presented at both the Hyde Park Art Center of Chicago and the Muzeum Narodowe Szczecinie.2 Schutta's work appeared in this show (see Image 1). With rare exceptions,3 the Polish American ethnic community's art making practices often have gone unnoticed. 2

 
Figure 2
    Image 2
    Treasured Polish Recipes for Americans.
    Minneapolis, MN: Polanie Publishing Co,
    1948. Artwork by Marya Werten.
 
 
      This paper is a call to arms, of sorts. It remains up to Polonian academics to engage these artists and their work because this engagement offers us a rich source for scholarly investigation into the crafting of ethnicity. Such study could allow us to examine the complexity of ethnic identity formation in the twenty-first century Polonian diaspora, offering us new models for defining ourselves. Second, Polish American artwork, which is almost completely absent from contemporary discussions of aesthetics, can offer new entrees into the pressing questions of representational politics and the dominant debates of modern art. 3
      When framing these discussions, earlier versions of this research were developed under the rubric "Crafting Ethnicity: Polish American Mixed Media Artists." This was done quite deliberately because I wanted to mobilize notions of art and craft, folklore and fine art to ask about the aesthetic space of Polish American life. If we examine Polish American scholarship and popular writing, one thing is clear: aesthetics are treated from a completely folkloric perspective (see Image 2). Most any Polish American text, whether an encyclopedic history for children, popular tome on ethnic heritage, or cookbook, mobilizes folkloric images as a way of marking Polish American ethnicity.4 This trope is long overdue for examination. Whether it is the lovely folkloric drawing of Marya Werten in the now classic Polanie Press Polish American Cookbook or the contemporary Wycinanki of Doris Sikorsky, Polish Americans mark their ethnicity through tropes of village-based folklore from the eighteenth century5 (see Image 3). These are certainly beautiful and legitimate artworks. However, the turn toward the folkloric which dominates our Polonian newspapers (see the Polish American Journal, for example), magazines, and visual media remains virtually uninterrogated from a political and metaphysical point of view. 4

 
Figure 3
    Image 3—"Wycinanki"
    Author's Collection.
 
 
      This scholarly approach to the topic is informed by Thomas Gladsky's "Presidential Address" to the Polish American Historical Association wherein he offered a provocative challenge for scholars, noting that we often "seem frozen by stereotypical and reductive portrayals of ethnicity as polkas, pierogies, and pisanki. Too frequently we turn to the quaint and charming, the noble and self-sacrificing, the self-indulgent and protective such as our persistent references to the wholesome family and selfless neighborhood, to babcias and ciocias, to wigilia and pisanki, to gentle nuns and inspirational parish priests. Our insecurity reveals itself," but does "little to extend or define ethnicity in scholarly terms."6 Gladsky cautions against the danger of ethnic nostalgia, a sentiment that closes down rather than opens up the ongoing personal and political struggle to define ourselves.7 5

 
Figure 4
    Image 4—"Portal Vision"
    Courtesy of William Grabowski
 
 
      As Gladsky has argued, scholars of white ethnicity often seem frozen by reductive portrayals of identity. This concern in the realm of aesthetics is related to my ongoing interrogation of the folkloric presentation of ethnicity. My work attempts to dissociate the folkloric from the nostalgic, arguing for the recovery and study of Polish American material culture—exploring self-articulation not as a private question but as an eminently public act. I want to argue for the recovery of material culture: in this case, contemporary collage and mixed media artworks as possible spaces for counter hegemonic analysis and practices of ethnic subjectivity. 6

 
Figure 5
    Image 5—"Galician Odyssey”"
    Courtesy of William Grabowski
 

 
Figure 6
    Image 6—"Ellis Island First Impressions"
    Courtesy of William Grabowski
 
 
      When we deploy folkloric images like wycinanki as a kind of compressed visual marker for ethnic identity, we run the risk of mythologizing and dehistoricizing ethnic and immigrant life. In addition to reifying past Polish American life, such deployment, moreover, marks Polish Americanness as somehow outside the space of the contemporary. While these folkloric forms are important and valuable, especially from the perspective of our community's largely working class history—their role in twenty-first century Polish American life must be questioned so as not to gloss over pressing questions of self, identity, and ethnic community. With this caution in mind, contemporary Polish American artwork is an ideal source for problematizing the articulation of ethnicity and identity. 7
      The Polish American media has been very lax on this front. Whether from parochialism or the working class anti-intellectualism that has often surfaced in our fraternals and community organizations, one would think from our self presentation that contemporary Polish Americans live in villages spinning flax and shearing sheep. This tension between the history of our turn of the twentieth century rural immigrant ancestors and our postmodern Polonian lives is animated in the work of William Grabowski. 8

 
Figure 7
    Image 7—"Welcome Home"
    Courtesy of William Grabowski
 
 
      Grabowski constructs three-dimensional mixed media pieces that combine photographs, often printed on transparencies, with contemporary and vintage items (see Image 4). In pieces such as "Portal Vision," acrylic boxes, as well as family objects rescued from the basement have found a home in his work. Pieces created have been autobiographical as well as fictitious. As the artist notes, "The people and places that inhabit my art work hopefully serve as catalysts for the viewer to consider their moment and their journey."8 This process of collage includes a vitally important and self conscious mix of the vintage and the contemporary, the fictitious and the autobiographical. This pastiche expresses visually the complexities of fashioning the ethnic self-narrative. Categories of memory and history are problematized in Grabowski's works with stunning results. 9
      One notes in all his work, for example "Galicia Odyssey," the crucial role that photography plays in Grabowski's assemblage (see Image 5). Perhaps the ultimate visual icon of modern identity, few artifacts measure up—in both ontological weight and sheer surface g—to the photograph. Susan Sontag claimed that, "As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."9 This quasi-historical, quasi-fictional character of photographic imagery is ideally suited to narratives of ethnic heritage and memory. Both nostalgic and immediate, both removed and close at hand, family photographs often become the compressed icon for our imagination of our ancestors. They stare back at us tempting and teasing, but never speaking. This dual character of photography is highlighted in Grabowski's pieces, where ancestors are transferred onto textiles and made into a window curtain as in his "Galicia Odyssey," or laminated onto a beer glass in his sculptural piece "The Miller's Tale" in homage to an agricultural forbearer (see cover image). 10

 
Figure 8
    Image 8—"The Sojourner"
    Courtesy of William Grabowski
 
 
      The opposing tensions that reside so provocatively in Grabowski's constructions create a level of self-consciousness and thoughtfulness in the artworks that extend to question the nature of art itself. His mixture of assemblage and three dimensional modeling forces the viewer to confront the collision of art and craft. As twentieth century art theorists began to interrogate museum politics, the question of how art is defined and who controls culture emerged. This is a very relevant issue for any immigrant community with a significant working class history. Those very immigrants who worked with hands as craftsman, building the woodwork in Chicago's bungalows were those most unlikely to ever enter a museum or train as fine artists. Yet, an ethos of pride in craftsmanship prevailed in this culture. Polish American mixed media artwork provides a wonderful space to revalue craft, craftsmanship, and handwork. Grabowski's assemblages, such as "Ellis Island First Impressions" are built works, after all (see Image 6). The carpentry required for Grabowski's "built environments" raises important questions about the class-based distinctions between the fine arts and crafts. 11
      If we attend to the work of art using the techniques of ethnic literary theory, we find that common metaphors and tropes surface in contemporary Polish American artwork. The importance of built structures and architectural space in Grabowski's pieces place the concept of home at the forefront of the work. He frequently mobilizes actual door and window frames in his constructions. As Bozena Shallcross has noted about Polish and Polish American literature, "Few concepts seem to have such universal appeal as the notion of the home…. With its seemingly infinite power to symbolize the whole range of nostalgic desires and values…."10 In Grabowski's works, architectural forms recur: children's building blocks retool in a model of Ellis Island, a discarded window, door or picture frame is remade anew. 12
      Shallcross is adept at explaining that the home is a cultural text, a notion at the heart of Grabowski's door-frame based work, "Welcome Home" (see Image 7). She suggests, "Home interpreted through its architectural framework is a house—the semantic distinction that is absent in the Polish language, where the single word dom signifies both a home and a house: a place where one belongs as well as its material embodiment, a mortar-and-brick building. A house translated into a narrative is a home, and if we follow this, home is the Polish sense of the word is both a place one identifies with and a place one built."11 Grabowski's three dimensional mixed media constructions, such as "Welcome Home," are soaring explorations of the metaphoric realm of place and displacement. 13
       The central role of digital technology in Grabowski's work is also instructive. The artist described his process as follows,

My art work has evolved to include many of the people and histories that helped build my life. I began by restoring heirloom photographs and combining them digitally with settings that had meaning to me or my family members. I found the computer to be a "dry" darkroom which enabled me to arrange, blend, and render images in seamless ways - much the same way our lives blend and link seamlessly together. I am particularly interested in the way differing levels of transparency can be achieved in the layers of a photomontage. That adds an aspect to my work that is essential. It permits connections between images in subtle and unique ways.12
14
       The technologies of digital manipulation are critical to understanding not only postmodern artworks but also postmodern identities. Bricolage and pastiche speak to the ways in which we fashion narratives of self and community, balancing multiple and sometimes competing identity formations. In fact, the space of ethnic narrative is visually imagined via metaphors of landscape. The architecture of ethnic memory and meaning is fashioned in collage form. As Grabowski explains,

I use photo montage and assemblage techniques to create visual narratives. Images and forms are digitized and then reinvented to open new stories of people and places. I have always embraced the concept of combining images and textures as it offers an opportunity to more richly define a subject. In particular I seek to explore familial and cultural themes with my work. Each piece is an attempt to arrange layers of images in a manner that blends individuals and settings together in ways that are both natural and unique. These cultural landscapes have been autobiographical or fictitious depending on the elements used. It is my hope that viewers creatively conjure their own stories from my work and reflect upon their own lives.13
 15
      Grabowski's photo montages, in the case of "The Sojourner," transferred onto the sails of a ship, speak directly and poignantly to metaphors of journey and migration (see Image 8). Conceived as both prayer and historical document, fiction and fact, Grabowski's artwork engages many of the tensions and torments of identity formation and memory. He says about his work that, "Understanding the links between our lives, histories and heritage and how they nurture our spirit is both an act of thanksgiving to the past and a legacy to the future."14 16
       The use of collage and assemblage is crucial to both Polish American artists under consideration. Especially central and provocative in both Grabowski and Schutta's artworks is their shared participation in techniques of collage and the collision of their art with the medium of photography. The centrality of photography to both their work illustrates the importance of photographic nostalgia in immigrant diasporic culture because, according to Sontag, people robbed of their past make the most fervent picture takers, both at home and abroad.15 Similarly, Diane Waldman has explained the function of collage techniques in artwork,

Emphasizing concept and process over end product, collage has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary. With its capacity for change, speed, immediacy, and ephemerality, collage is ideally suited to the demands of this and the prior century. It is a medium of materiality, a record of our civilization, a document of the timely and the transitory. It is no wonder that today's artists continue to use collage as a way of giving expression to the unorthodox, both in art and life.16
 17

 
Figure 9
    Image 9—"Duzo (Plenty)"
    Courtesy of Katharine Schutta
 
 
      This unorthodoxy was perhaps most publicly expressed in the exuberance of Pop Art, which collapsed distinctions between the fine and commercial arts using magazine illustrations, comic books, record albums and advertising campaigns. Warhol once expressed his philosophy in one poignant sentence: "When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums."17 Warhol was single handedly able to address the questions of reproduction and reification so central to Benjamin's worry about the work of art. If the work of art requires an original, Warhol would remove originality from the equation. As Walter Benjamin noted about the reification of the authentic artwork, "The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity."18 Thus, in Pop Art, not only was the image source chosen from mass culture (the Campbell's soup can or Marilyn Monroe), it was created using techniques of mass reproduction. Warhol, like other Pop artists, used found printed images from newspapers, publicity stills, and advertisements as his subject matter; he adopted silk-screening, a technique of mass reproduction, as his medium. And unlike the Abstract Expressionists, who searched for a spiritual pinnacle in their art, Warhol aligned himself with the signs of contemporary mass culture. His embrace of subjects traditionally considered debased—from celebrity worship to food la—has been interpreted as both an exuberant affirmation of American culture and a thoughtless espousal of the "low."19 18
      The embrace of found imagery also characterizes the work of Katharine Henryka Schutta. Artwork born of the cut and paste experiments of the surrealists is well suited to the complications of immigrant aesthetics. Moving between craft and art, creative reuse and the recycling of icons and detritus both, collage allows artwork to span a stunning range of subject matter from the sublime to the ridiculous. 19
      Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," raised a series of aesthetic questions that defined the twentieth century—issues that are addressed with great impact in the aesthetics of immigrant Diaspora.20 Issues of originality, reproduction, repeatability and authenticity emerged as the central aesthetic issues of the atomic age. With similar impact, Susan Sontag's On Photography engaged the photographic image at the heart of contemporary visual culture.21 Both of these issues are treated head on in the collage of Katharine Schutta. Schutta's work manages to join the sacred and profane, the mundane and the sublime in often shocking and humorous collage, the very surfaces of which explore the nature of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction. The tendency for quaint and comforting folkloric notions of ethnic identity is firmly thwarted in Schutta's provocative images. 20

 
Figure 10
    Image 10—"Venus"
    Courtesy of Katharine Schutta
 
 
      Schutta's 1993 work entitled "Duzo (Plenty)" (see Image 9) introduces her trademark juxtaposition of images; here innocence—in the figure of 1950s magazine chil—approaches the vulgarity of plenty, with a freshly butchered headless animal torso in the foreground. In the exhibition catalog for Transcultural Visions, Schutta described her travels in 1980s solidarity-era Poland, awakening to the vast difference in life for her cousins under martial law and her own experiences in the States. The vulgarity of American prosperity when opposed to the privations of Soviet era communist rule in Poland set the context for an almost pornographic tone in the image. Especially significant is the raining downpour of grain, a motif shared in Grabowski's "The Miller's Tale." In Polish and Polish American immigrant culture, the significance of bread as holy, the wafer of Holy Communion and the fundamental role of grain in rural agricultural life resonates in a special way. The surplus of grain in Schutta's image speaks powerfully of haves and have-nots. 21
       At the time of Schutta's travels and study in Poland and Russia, she encountered then-illegal contemporary Polish prints kept by curators at the National Museum in Warsaw. Her exposure to Witkacy's self-portraits shifted her own aspirations from architecture to art. She notes,

My primary medium is collage, which is by coincidence, a very Polish medium: examples being the folk art of Polish lace-like wycinanki and poster artists such as Cieslewicz. The nature of my image making is more closely related to poetry than to visual media. I bring images and stories together and look within the space between these juxtapositions for new meanings in the final images.22
22
      As Schutta describes it, collage opens a spatial dimension, an architectural, metatextual space in which hidden, unexpected and, perhaps, contradictory meanings emerge. As seen in the work of the surrealists, Dadaists and their literary counterparts, the play of bricolage opens possibilities born out of contradiction and recombinant identities. Like the linguistic play of so many immigrant children, those in-between zones of what Andy Golebiowski calls "Half-na-pó," collage addresses that in-between, the not-quite-at-home, the uncanny and unsettled spaces of hybrid identity.23 23

      One of the strengths of Schutta's work is that it resists being pulled into nostalgia for a bygone immigrant era by refusing to reference supposedly "ethnic" tropes with quasi-nationalist abandon. As numerous scholars have noted, our beloved but seamless narratives of immigrant ancestors in nineteenth century garb transmitting their culture somehow unvarnished to succeeding generations simply does not wash. Narrative and history are not unbroken and certainly are not linear. In fits and starts, we situate ourselves in various cultural locations, within competing identities, in fragments of language remembered and revisioned. What is important to note is that this pastiche of identity formation is not somehow fallen and inauthentic. What I found most startling about Mary Erdmans's sociological study The Grasinski Girls was the way in which her subjects saw themselves as "not really Polish" or not authentically ethnic, as though their own subjectivities were somehow falsified and illegitimate.

Despite their minimal intellectual, affective, and political ties to Poland, they nonetheless posit Poland as the source of real Polishness, and in doing so they minimize their American-grown Polishness. For them, Poland creates genuine Polishness, the right way to be Polish and they question their own ethnicity in this language of "realness"—we are not "that Polish," my friends are "more Polish" than me…. Their Polishness is diminished when they define its constructedness as some sort of bastardization….24
24

 
Figure 11
    Image 11—"Vulcan"
    Courtesy of Katharine Schutta
 
 
      Buried within this important and common thread of ethnic expression is a modernist presupposition about the real and authentic, the mythical "true Pole" that eludes and escapes the Polish American. This is nothing less than an ontological quandary we Polish Americans often reproduce in our longing for a pure Polishness free from the collage of our own diasporic identities. As Erdmans notes, "Their ethnicity, like their language, is present but not spoken, hidden not absent, private not public."25 The public nature of visual culture poses a significant remedy to this longing. One of the most important aspects of Schutta's work is her piercing challenge to such essentializing notions of ethnic identity. 26
      Central to this challenge is Schutta's use of collage and found images (see Image 10). Ethnic identity is about where we find ourselves made and remade, rather than an elusive essence just out of our reach. One of the great strengths of her artwork, there is virtually nothing nostalgic about the bricolage of Schutta's compositions. The ready-to-hand appearance of her iconic images and the pixilated dots of mechanical production she so beautifully enhances scream that this has been fashioned of other stuff. There is no original here. In a startling chain of reproductive creativity, Schutta tears free the image from its source, demystifying the reified origin for which we seem to long. Central to this aesthetic is her masterful use of photocopying technology. Having worked on large scale photocopying machines in London on fellowship at the Royal School of Art, Schutta has engaged the problem of reproduction in the mechanical age with gusto. 27

 
Figure 12
    Image 12—"Arachne"
    Courtesy of Katharine Schutta
 
 
      Schooled in Art History at Bryn Mawr College, Schutta is adept at mobilizing the masters in unexpected ways. In this case, the foundation for her collage is a Baroque masterwork of the late sixteenth century, Annibale Carracci's "Venus with a Satyr and Cupids" (oil on canvas ca. 1588). Housed in the Uffizi, this painting, which was already famous in the seventeenth century, was for moral reasons covered over with another canvas of a more chaste allegorical subject through most of the eighteenth century. The recovery of the original in 1812 restored a work of importance in Carracci's oeuvre as a master of Italian early baroque. The subject, which is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, was regarded in the Renaissance period as offering the greatest possible scope for a painter's brush—a male and a female nude, strong emotion, pathos, her—and, since Adonis was a hunter, dogs as well. The lush baroque offerings in the image were received in more puritanical times as somewhat lewd. Schutta plays on the vuluptuosity of the original by adding the figure of a young boy with a carrot held like a weapon. 28
      In the mix of lush imagery, including the cupids and their somewhat lascivious looks, we find the naked torso of innocent youth, an unsettling and disturbing mixture. The contradiction of youth and the old masters, photographs and oil paintings dominates Schutta's work, creating a disturbing and palpable tension between the ancient, revered masters and the contemporary. In fact, her juxtapositions refresh the power of this masterwork, which for many sight-seers becomes one of dozens in the scenery, checked off the list during a must-see visit to the Uffizi. What could have been "yet another Baroque allegory" is refreshingly shocking and somewhat sinister in Schutta's hands. 29

 
Figure 13
    Image 13—"Holiday Balls"
    Courtesy of Katharine Schutta
 
 
      Schutta's work suggests that the iconography of Polish American contemporary art need not be explicitly nationalistic: babushkas and flags, pierogi and Polish mountainsides need not be referenced for the artist to be genuinely "ethnic." The issue at hand is the metatextual concern of pastiche, of making and remaking narratives of identity from the old world and the new. The confrontation of the old and new is a recurring motif in Schutta's compositions: oil painting and photography, (old) master and (boy) child recur in her work (see Image 11). In her "Vulcan," a young lad, perhaps from a 1950s Boy's Life magazine, is seen before his kitchen's Frigidaire, emerging onto a classical scene of blacksmiths. His steely gaze at the viewer of the collage changes the viewer's relationship to the unidentified torsos of the classical composition. Now a study in masculine iconography, the boy's disturbing gaze turns to the viewer, making us complicit, accusing us somehow for our participation in the spectacular display of masculinity. 30
      Also critical to Schutta's imaginary space is the presence of food and displays of sustenance. The bodily logic of ingestion renders a crushing blow to whatever ethereal concerns we might assign high art. Whether posed before a refrigerator or having a drink from a cup, Schutta's "protagonists" or interlopers disrupt the logic of the home image (see Image 13). In her "Arachne," another boy from contemporary American imagery insinuates himself, this time amidst lush tapestries and nobility. A woman of servitude also appears in the foreground. This displacement is crucial to the sensibility of these artworks. Slightly unnerving, the interlopers, like strangers in a foreign land(scape), are poignant observers out of place and out of time. This serves as an effective metaphor for the displaced person, dropped into a strange landscape out of context. 31
      The sense of displacement achieved in Schutta's work is highlighted with a humorous sensibility. Her work often presents iconic representations of gender identity and does so with wit and edge (see Image 13). Her "Holiday Balls" presents the collaged images of young boyish torsos, this time hauling a galvanized tub of breast-like bombe (holiday ornaments). In this case, the collage artistry of Schutta accomplishes the tasks that Sontag attributed to the photographer. Schutta's compositions, like photographs "both loot and preserve, denounce and consecrate."26 This ability to make magical the ordinary, to infuse the banal materials of collage with a kind of radiance, strikes one as a particularly Catholic trait, drawing upon the Catholic analogical imagination (which imagines God as part of the everyday world) as well as on the visual iconography of Polish American life, homes and churches. Do contemporary printmaking, collage and installation need to be emblazoned with the Czarna Madonna (Black Madonna) to be authentically Polish American? Of course not. What seems apparent, however, is that the shimmer of incarnational theology, the tactility of prayer book holy cards and dining room Madonnas, infuses this artwork with a kind of vitality that is very powerful and moving. 32
      The Polish American heritage of these mixed media artists seems to invite a collage technique that is profoundly surreal and yet ironically well-suited to questions of historical memory. In engaging questions of history and memory, identity and ethnicity, both Grabowski and Schutta take for their subject matter the past itself. A sense of pathos is typical of what Sontag identifies as the nature of American photography, that is to say, the work is imbued with a sense of loss. As Susan Sontag commented, "The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects—making it possible ... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing."27 33
      Sontag's comment helps explain what is so compelling about these Polish American artworks. Both William Grabowski and Katharine Schutta display the ability to present personal history and public memory in one moment, to hold contradictions in tension, to create an aesthetic space where the viewer is simultaneously eerily at home and uncomfortably displaced. In doing so, these artists allow us to consider pressing issues of identity formation without recourse to tired, nostalgic formulations of ethnic essentialism. Rather, these artworks inspire us to ask about our own narratives of ethnicity with renewed vigor and vigilance. 34


1See Karen Majewski, Traitors and True Poles (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003); Thomas J. Napierkowski, "Does Anyone Know My Name? A History of Polish American Literature," Polish American Studies, Vol. LXII, No. 2 (August 2005), 23-46; Thomas S. & Rita Holmes Gladsky, eds., Something of My Very Own to Say (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.)

2Transcultural Visions. Exhibition Catalog (Wroc¬aw: Korab, 2002).

3See John J. Bukowczyk, "The Big Lebowski Goes to the Polish Wedding: Polish Americans—Hollywood Style," The Polish Review, Vol. XLLVII, No. 2 (2002), 211-230.

4See Margaret C. Hall, Polish Americans (Chicago: Heinemann Library, 2003); Jacek Nowakowski and Marlene Perrin, eds., Polish Touches (Iowa City, IA: Penfield Press, 1996); Polanie Club, Treasured Polish Recipes for Americans (Minneapolis, MN: Polanie Publishing Co., 1948).

5Doris Sikorsky's wycinanki have been lauded in many circles. She received 1999 and 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowships in Ethnic and Folk Arts, and an Illinois Arts Council Master/Apprentice Grant in Ethnic and Folk Arts, Master of Wycinanki-Polish Paper Cutting (1998, 2000). Nominated for a 1998 National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship in Folk and Traditional Arts, she has exhibited and taught at numerous locales including Art Institute of Chicago Kraft Education Center and the Chicago Cultural Center, Illinois State Museum, Springfield.

6Thomas S. Gladsky, "Beyond Sentiment," Polish American Studies, Vol. LVIII, No. 1 (Spring 2001), 10.

7Ann Hetzel Gunkel, "Of Polka, Pierogi, and Ethnic Identity: Toward A Polish American Cultural Studies," Polish American Studies, Vol. LXII, No. 1 (Spring 2005), 29-42.

8William Grabowski, unpublished artist's statement, 2005.

9Susan Sontag, "Melancholy Objects," in On Photography (New York: Farrer, Strauss and Giroux, 1973), 71.

10Bozena Shallcross, "Home Truths: Toward a Definition of the Polish Home," in Bozena Shallcross, ed. Framing the Polish Home (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), 1.

11Shallcross, 2.

12Grabowski.

13Grabowski.

14Grabowski.

15Sontag, 71.

16Guggenheim Museum, accessed at http://www.guggenheimcollection.org January 2, 2006.

17Guggenheim Museum.

18Guggenheim Museum.

19I would argue that the ability to elevate the mundane into the iconic, the found into the fabulous was in part due to a sensibility honed from his life as Andrew Warhola born into a working-class immigrant Ruthenian Catholic upbringing in Pittsburgh.

20Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968; Harry Zohn, transl.), 217-252.

21Sontag.

22Transcultural Visions, 2, 170-71.

23Andrew Golebiowski, "Three Languages Out of Two: Polish, English and Half-napo," unpublished paper presented at the Polish American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C. January, 2004.

24Mary Erdmans, Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990 (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998), 63.

25Erdmans, 64.

26Sontag, 54.

27Sontag, 54.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

 



Spring, 2009 Previous Table of Contents Next