Academy of Fine Arts, Łódź

About

The Academy of Fine Art (Polish: Akademia Sztuk Pięknych) is a public university in Łódź for artists. Created in 1945, it was initially one of seven academies of Fine Arts in Poland. The academy was renamed in honor of one of its founders, Władysław Strzemiński, in 1988. The Academy offers a wide variety of educational fine art programs in fashion design, jewelry design, visual communication, film and digital art, art theory and history, photography, textile arts, as well as several other art-focused degree programs. The school is located on 121 Wojska Polskiego Street in Łódź. The Academy, headed by its president Professor Grzegorz Chojnacki, employs 63 faculty members to instruct its 1,287 students. The academy's iconic fashion design centerCentrum Promoji Modyfeatures a visual identity and CI (Corporate Identity) design created by the renowned Japanese CI designer Hiromi Inayoshi, who also served as a professor at the school from 2015 to 2019.

The Academy was founded in 1945 as The State Higher School of Fine Arts (Polish: Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Sztuk Plastycznych). It was created by many local artists such as Władysław Strzemiński and Stefan Wagner, as well as invited guests from abroad: Felicjan Szczęsny Kowarski, Roman Modzelewski, Ludwik Tyrowicz, Władysław Daszewski and Stefan Byrski. At first, there were only three departments: the Department of Fabric and Cloths, the Department of Ceramics, and the Department of Graphics. The Academy's first president was Leon Ormezowski. The professors and founders spent the first two years creating the Academy's program by searching for inspiration in artistic and didactic literary outputs of bauhaus and Kazimierz Malewicz’s pedagogical experience. Władysław Strzemiński had a great influence on the Academy’s development, both through his five years of teaching and through his artistic and didactic approach. In honor of his contributions and influence, the Academy adopted his name in 1988. Strzemiński was a painter, a theoretician and a teacher of avant-garde of international renown. Known as the creator of Unism Theory, Strzemińskiwas also strongly connected with Łódź even though he hailed from Mińsk. He lost his arm, leg and sight in one eye during the First World War, but that did not discourage him from continuing with his artistic education. He ended up as an assistant to Kazimierz Malewicz in Russia. Within just a few years, he found himself in the forefront of Russia’s avant-garde movement, working with Eliezer Lisicki and Alexander Rodchenko. In 1931, he came to live in Łódź for good. There he developed his Association of Polish Artists and Designers. In 1932, he received a Reward of Town Łódź. Due to expansion, the Academy moved to larger and more modern premises in 1976. Prior to then, the school had been located in a post-war building. The new building was designed by Bolesław Kardaszewski. This monumental building is an example of Kardaszewski's contemporary realizations, designed just for the artistic academy. The name of the Academy was changed at the end of the 20th century. In 1996, it was renamed to its current title, "Academy of Fine Arts".

The Academy organizes various competitions, displays and fashion shows for their students. Also, the Academy cooperates with foreign academies not only for the Erasmus Programme for student exchange, but also for internship placements and employees' scientific delegations. Selected cities with which the Academy cooperates are Hasselt, Belgium; Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria; Zlín, Czech Republic; Helsinki, Finland; Grenoble, Lyon, and Paris, France; Alicante, Burgos, Málaga, and Valencia, Spain; Dublin, Ireland; Dortmund and Berlin, Germany; Lisbon, Portugal; Geneva, Switzerland; İzmir, Turkey; Budapest, Hungary; and Florence, Urbino and Brescia, Italy.

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.