The conversation between art historian Iwona Kałuża and historian Maciej Mądry explores the intersection of art, industry, and women’s lives in Lower Silesia after 1945. The researchers reveal how postwar border shifts, the growth of textile and ceramics factories, and socialist propaganda shaped the everyday experiences of women — both workers and artists — employed in industrial settings.
You’ll learn, among other things:
- why Lower Silesia became such an important industrial region and what really happened to the factories after the war;
- how the feminization of light industry occurred — and why so many women worked in textiles and ceramics;
- what women’s working conditions were like: noise, temperature, humidity, piecework, and the social infrastructure such as workplace nurseries;
- how the state sought to “aestheticize” everyday life through institutions like the Bureau for the Supervision of Production Aesthetics and the Institute of Industrial Design;
- how artists found their way into factories — designing porcelain, textiles, and even heavy machinery (for example, road rollers for the Fadroma company);
- how workplace patronage operated: factory galleries, exhibitions for workers, and installment plans for purchasing art;
- why student internships in glassworks and porcelain factories offered exceptional opportunities for artistic experimentation — and why such experiences are so sorely missed today.
This episode explores how women, art, and factories together shaped postwar Lower Silesia — with all its paradoxes, caught between propaganda, exploitation, and genuine emancipation and creativity.
The conversation took place on October 11, 2025, during a popular-science forum from the 15% of Abstraction series, organized by the Art Transparent Foundation. This year’s edition focused on the social, productive, and affective dimensions of women’s artistic labor, with particular attention devoted to sculptors, ceramic artists, and designers from Lower Silesia.
The forum “White Spots Are… – Sculptors and Ceramic Artists of Postwar Wrocław” served as an open platform for gathering dispersed materials and stories about the lives and work of Wrocław’s women artists, including Janina Szczypczyńska, Regina Konieczka, and the Skomorowska sisters. Four discussions and one lecture were held, examining not only the historical contexts of these artists’ biographies but also their legacies and influence on subsequent generations of art and artists.
