Historicity and Modern Craft: Wanda Telakowska and the Institute for Industrial Design

• In Event: Art, Ideology, and Memory: Polish Artistic Practices in the Early Communist Era

Abstract

The artist Wanda Telakowska founded the Institute for Industrial Design (Instytut Wzornictwa Przemysłowego, IWP) in Warsaw in 1950. Tasked with revitalizing regional craft practices and integrating peasant artisanal labor into Poland’s project of postwar industrial development, the IWP brought together artists from rural provinces as well as the urban metropole, industrial designers, ethnographers, and art historians. By presenting and the IWP, this paper examines underrecognized aspects of design and mass production in postwar Poland alongside the persistence of historical local forms of pre-industrial manufacture within the contexts of socialist nation building and its ideological mandates for de-localized transnational worker solidarity.

Author

• Jason Mientkiewicz, The Metropolitan Museum of Art