Magdalena Moskalewicz
Magdalena Moskalewicz is an art historian, curator, and author. Her academic research mostly focuses on socialist modernism , the neo-avantgardes, and art making/reception under Communist state patronage, while in her curatorial practice, Moskalewicz collaborates with living artists to critically investigate particular histories, localities, and identities with the goal of reshaping dominant narratives. Moskalewicz worked at collecting, exhibiting, and higher education institutions internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 56th Venice Biennale, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others, and is now Chief Curator of FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art.
Moskalewicz was awarded a PhD in art history from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, in 2012, for her research into the experiments with painting in Poland in the aftermath of the post-Stalinist Thaw. She published and lectured internationally on postwar abstraction, Eastern European neo-avantgardes, including their connections to Fluxus, and on the international circulation of Polish modern art during the Cold War as well as Socialist Realism. Her extensive writing practice has addressed art histories, cultural policies, and social activism, including essays in Art in America, Op-Eds in the Washington Post, contributions to exhibition catalogs from the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, Berlin Biennale, and book chapters in Understanding Central Europe (2018), Conceptualism and Materiality (2019), Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (2020), Was Socialist Realism Global? (2023), and Reconstructing Exhibitions in Art Institutions (2023), among others.
Moskalewicz treats curating as another form of intellectual inquiry that complements scholarly reflection by using diverse approaches, and a wider range of potential—sometimes unorthodox—output formats. Among her exhibitions was Halka/ Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W: C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska curated for the Polish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Her accompanying book under the same title was awarded the 2017 Jean Goldman Book Prize. Moskalewicz’s curatorial projects were shown in Europe, United States, and the Caribbean.
Moskalewicz has been engaged in the international research into Eastern European art histories for over a decade. In 2010-2011, she was a core group participant in “Unfolding Narratives: Art Histories in East-Central Europe After 1989,” organized by the Clark Art Institute. As Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral C-MAP Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art, in 2012-2015, she conducted research and organized academic programs for the Eastern European branch of MoMA’s global research initiative, C-MAP. Most recently, she participated in the research project ”Confrontations: Sessions in East European History” organized by the Postsocialist Art Center at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London (2019-2022).
As editor, Moskalewicz ran the Polish contemporary art monthly magazine, Arteon, and later spearheaded a number of digital humanities publications for MoMA’s digital platform on art from around the globe, post.
Over the years, her research has been supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Getty, The Clark, the Kosciuszko Foundation, Polish Ministry of Higher Education, and others. In 2020, Moskalewicz received Mary Zirin Prize awarded by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. (2024)
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