February 2, 2010

We are delighted to announce that our award-winning Graphic Design program has added 117 new poster designs, donated by Barbara Lewalski, the wife of Kenneth F. Lewalski, to its Polish Poster Collection. The Kenneth F. Lewalski Polish Poster Collection features posters on jazz, theater and film and by artists such as Stasys Eidrigovicius, Roman Cieslewicz and Waldemar Swierzy. These new additions don’t duplicate the over one-thousand posters in the Frank Fox Collection which we acquired in 2008. Professor Lewalski was an authority on Polish history and acquired much of his collection on research trips to Poland. The Kenneth F. Lewalski Polish Poster Collection contains posters from the same time period as the Fox Collection and is an important tool for teaching the artistic, cultural and technical aspects of poster art.

The Graphic Design program is currently creating digital files of each poster with the goal of creating an interactive online database for our entire Polish Poster Collection. With the addition of this great collection, we will curate future exhibitions for our own gallery and other cultural institutions.

Several years ago the Graphic Design Program secured the remarkable Polish poster collection of Professor Frank Fox. Fox’s collection contains upwards of a thousand print works of art that were created between the 1930's and the 1990's and represents a collection of internationally recognized poster artists that brought Poland to the forefront of modern poster design. The collection includes posters for dozens of American movies, for sports, for tourism, for heavy industry and for consumer products. Some have subtle political undertones resulting from years of communist rule, while others supported the Solidarity movement. Poster art rose to a position of prominence in Poland in the late 19th century and the First International Exhibition of the Poster took place in Cracow in 1898.