Aneta Szylak (1959–2023)

Polish educator, curator, and critic Aneta Szyłak, a cofounder and inaugural director of Gdańsk, Poland’s Łaźnia Center for Contemporary Art, died October 31.Newsof her death was announced by New York–based independent curator Bartek Remisko. Szyłak, a leading figure in the alternative and politically concerned Gdańsk art scene, was instrumental in the founding of Nomus New Art Museum. Opening in 2021 in a former shipyard, the institution, an offshoot of the city’s National Museum, is Poland’s newest museum of contemporary art. Aneta Szyłak was born on June 6, 1959, in Puck, a small town in northern Poland on the south coast of the Baltic Sea.

After earning her master’s degree at the University of Gdańsk, she began her career in the latter half of the 1980s, organizing contemporary art exhibitions for the Museum of the Puck Region. In 1998, with Grzegorz Klaman, she established the Łaźnia Center for Contemporary Art (Łaźniain English is “bathhouse” and refers to the institution’s home, a century-old former public bathing facility). She served as the museum’s first director, occupying the role for three years. In 2004, she assumed the directorship of Gdańsk’s Wyspa Institute of Art.

Six years later, she became artistic director of the Gdańsk–based Alternativa Foundation, which through events such as festivals and programming promotes artistic, research, and curatorial work related to the visual arts. Szyłak conceived of the framework for Nomus, which after nearly seven years of preparation opened in 2021 as Gdańsk’s first museum to house a permanent collection of contemporary art.RelatedHELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION SUED FOR “DESTROYING” PAINTER’S LEGACYBMA CREATES PAID INTERNSHIPS HONORING VALERIE MAYNARD “To go away from mainstream pressures we should make our own formats, structures and platforms, forms of display, discourse and institutional framework,” Szyłak toldA*Deskin 2018. “Reinvention of institutional forms that differ from calcified forms what can we understood as transformation of ‘what’ into ‘how.’ Making institution, similarly to exhibition making, is an act of authorship and the tool for mediation of feelings to expand to the impact on what is outside of art institution.” Szyłak led Nomus for only a few months before beingforced outby conservative Gdańsk National Museum director Jacek Friedrich. Besides contributing art criticism to various publications, she taught or lectured at colleges and universities including the New School, New York University, and Queens College, all in New York; Florida Atlantic University; Goldsmiths, University of London; Copenhagen University; and the Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem. She served as a guest professor at the Akademie für Bildende Künst in Mainz, Germany. “[Szyłak] remains painfully underestimated—both as a [public] intellectual and organizer,” wrote Arkadiusz Półtorak, president of the Polish chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, on Facebook.

Półtorak noted that the organization had planned to honor her with a lifetime achievement award at an upcoming convention; the award will be presented posthumously..