3: "Working Class History and the Institute of Design" by Janina Ciezadlo (Wednesday, July 8)

These photographs were probably taken by my Uncle Frank (Francis) Ciezadlo sometime in the Forties. The influence of the School of Design, of the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others is clear. The man with the book is my father, John Ciezadlo. I am not sure who the other man is. It might be Ed (Syzsynski??) a friend of my father's who had a sailboat. it is dated 1940 and says, I think, "Seagull." I know my Uncle Frank brought back a Leica from Germany during WWII, although I am not sure he was using the Leica here, and I am not sure about the dates. Frank Ciezadlo was a photographer in the service (I don't know which service) and later made his living as an illustrator; he changed his name to Cidell, because he thought it would be easier to stay employed without the difficult ethnic name. My mother, who doesn't appear in any of these photos, attended classes at the Institute of Design. I grew up with the ideas, ideals, and the visual sense that my parents and uncle encountered there. I began my own career with the fundamental studio training -- based on the Bauhaus curriculum in those days -- at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

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Criticism by Janina Ciezadlo has appeared in the The Chicago Reader; Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, the CACNews and Bridge. Poetry and photographs a published in Afterhours; A Journal of Chicago Poetry and Art and Hubbub; a proposal for an intervention was featured in the inaugural issue of Prompt. In June she participated in the National Endowment for the Arts International Arts Journalism Institute in the Visual Arts at American University with arts journalists from Bosnia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Columbia, South Africa and colleagues from the US. She has been an artist-in-residence at OxBow and Ragdale. Color intaglios, paintings and an installation of photographs have been displayed most recently at Kocielak Gallery. She learned about the relationship between theory and practice through her work in organizing the first part-time faculty union in a private college and serving as president of the union local. She has a special interest in Modernism and published a scholarly monograph on the Livre D’Artist: La fin du monde filmée par l’Ange N-D by Fernand Léger and Blaise Cendrars in the Yearbook for Interdisciplinary Studies in the Fine Arts, other writings on modernism and film have been published in the Proceedings of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Studies of Social Imagery.

To contact Janina, please email her at merelycirculating@gmail.com.