Year of LANDSCAPE / DEMOCRACY / WELLNESS
2021 at Mildred's Lane in the age of Coronavirus Horror
Abakanowicz Creative Community Fellowship
Mildred’s Lane is proud to announce the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation (AACCF) is awarding $50,000 to establish the Abakanowicz Creative Community Fellowship.
One or more Abakanowicz Fellows will be appointed over each of the next five years (2021-2025). This award is given to help support fellows’ activities and living expenses, as well as related public programs for each summer’s educational program at Mildred’s Lane.
This award acknowledges Magdalena Abakanowicz’s belief that an artist is best stimulated and challenged to grow in the community of artists, other creative persons, and intellectuals who query deeply the times in which they live, finding lessons in history, culture, and importantly nature.
We share with you these words of the artist when she spoke of her close friendship with pioneer avant-garde painter Henryk Stażewski (1894–1988):
I was brought up by a Polish Constructivist who was the friend of Mondrian, and who worked in the Cercle et Carre in Paris. His name is Henryk Stażewski. I never studied with him; you can't see any Constructivism in my work. I was very close to him for many years. He was my dear friend. In his one-room flat on the twelfth floor of an apartment building the intellectuals of Warsaw used to come together and talk: poets, musicians, theater people, historians, visual artists, also writers and politicians. Everything was questioned, and the search for new reality, for answers to existential problems touched all areas of human thoughts and intellect. This was my school. It was really a fantastic group for many years, and they accepted me, and I had this marvelous feeling that because they criticized me, they were interested in my work.
It's the same kind of raising that you have in family life where you teach your children with your own behavior, the way you speak, the way you make comments. Not something direct.... It was at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s after the Stalinist period when we had absolute freedom and we felt the necessity to prove that we had something to express. This was a very interesting period. I was with these people sitting in the corner, listening and very happy that I was being accepted. Then we became friends, and it was a kind of family for me for many years.
Mildred’s Lane sends its gratitude to the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation and announces these Abakanowicz Fellows 2021;
Elise Wigle-Wells / Pennsylvania USA
Julia O. Bianco / Argentina-Mexico-USA
Samiha Tasnim / Bangladesh-New York USA
Leila Gordon / Pennsylvania USA
Rich Garr / New York USA
Thank you, AACCF_
J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion