04 Jun 2021

Not Yet Written Stories - Women Artists' Archives Online

'Not Yet Written Stories - Women Artists' Archives Online' -

to fill a lacuna in European art history


The innovative project for women's art, implemented as part of the Creative Europe program, was created thanks to the initiative of the Arton Foundation in Warsaw. Its aim is to build the international bridge of the knowledge exchange and restore the memory of art by avant-garde female artists from Poland, Slovenia, Croatia and Latvia.



The Arton Foundation, together with partner institutions from Ljubljana, Zagreb and Riga, has been digitizing the archives of European avant-garde art for several years. The main idea of this project is to build an innovative database and make the cross-border online repository widely available to all users. Such a rich collection of European and women's art is presented to the public absolutely free of charge at forgottenheritage.eu

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As art historians and researchers of art, we believe that it is extremely important to include the works of female artists in public discourse and to prevent further discrimination against women in the field of art - says Marika Kuźmicz, project curator and founder of the Arton Foundation.



On June 18, an exhibition will open at the lokal_30 gallery and in Arton Foundation in Warsaw, presenting unique discoveries about students of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, who were lost in the turmoil of the war. Following the traces of a dozen or so biographies, we try to investigate the fate of the protagonists and recall those women-artists who have so far received due attention from history. The title of the exhibition is a quotation from an interview with Krystyna Dydyńska, one of the students of the interwar academy and a rally driver:

Three Things I Love in Life: the Car, Liquor, and Sailors: 

Untold Stories of Women Students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, 1918–1939


ARTISTS: Helena Bukowska, Krystyna Dydyńska, Wiktoria Goryńska, Julia Keilowa, Janina Konarska, Julia Kotarbińska, Bogna Krasnodębska-Gardowska, Janina Kłopocka, Elżbieta Malcz–Klewin, Leonia Nadelman/Janecka, Maria Nicz-Borowiakowa, Jadwiga Simon-Pietkiewicz, Resia Schor, Elwira Zachert–Mazurczyk, Wanda Zawidzka–Manteuffel


Three Things I Love in Life: the Car, Liquor, and Sailors is an exhibition organised by female students of the Faculty of Management of Visual Culture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in collaboration with the Arton Foundation and lokal_30 gallery. The archive of the Academy of Fine Arts has preserved files of as many as 926 female students from the years 1918–1939. However, only some of these artists forged artistic careers that secured them a place in Polish art history. Left after most of them is only a hand-written résumé and an enrolment application stored in an archival file. The exhibition tells the stories of seventeen female students of the Warsaw School of Fine Arts (later renamed the Academy of Fine Arts) from the interwar period. The show seeks to follow their histories by discovering their later fate and reviewing their artistic oeuvre. 


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WHEN: 18 June 2021 — 15 September 2021

WHERE: lokal_30 gallery, Wilcza 29a/12, 00—544 Warsaw, Poland
Arton Foundation, Foksal 11/4, 00-372 Warsaw, Poland

CURATORS: Dobromiła Dobro, Agnieszka Kalita, Hanna Kraś, Agata Ostrowska, Agata Plater-Zyberk, Katarzyna Trzeciak

CONTENT-RELATED SUPERVISION: dr Marika Kuźmicz   

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Subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Fund for the Promotion of Culture.
The exhibition forms part of the 'NOT YET WRITTEN STORIES: WOMEN ARTISTS' ARCHIVES ON-LINE' project within the Creative Europe program.


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Project partners:

Arton Foundation, Poland

LCCA - Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Latvia

Office for Photography, Croatia

SCCA-Ljubljana - Center for Contemporary Arts, Slovenia