Polish-American Heritage on the Niagara Frontier

Jozef Mazur (1897-1970), was born in a Galician family in 1897. He studied at the Albright Art School in Buffalo and at the New York Art Institute. Mazur worked in a variety of media. His stained glass works can be found in churches in Philadelphia, New York City and Buffalo. Before he became 30, Mazur distinguished himself as an ecclesiastical painter in this area. His first commission was the complete decoration of St. Stanislaus Church in Buffalo. His works can also be found in St. Adalbert's, Blessed Trinity, the Polish National Cathedral, St. John Gualbert's, and Villa Maria Academy, Holy Trinity in Niagara Falls, and St. Aloysius in Springville. Mazur also painted churches in Rochester, NY, Chicago, IL, Detroit, MI, Adams, MA, New Haven, CT, and Trenton and Perth Amboy in New Jersey. Mazur's secular works include the sculpted bust of Frederick Chopin (see Places to Visit), a life-size portrait of Kazimierz Pulaski in Olean, and interior decoration at the UB Main Street Campus.

Jozef Bakos (1891-1977), a painter, was one of Los Cinco Pintores who worked in Santa Fe New Mexico. Bakos studied art with John E. Thompson at the Albright Art Institute in Buffalo New York. He later followed Thompson to Colorado and taught at the University of Boulder. In 1920 during a break from teaching, Bakos visited Walter Mruk, a childhood friend and artist who was living in Santa Fe New Mexico. During his stay he exhibited some paintings together with Mruk at the Museum of Fine Arts. The next year he moved to Santa Fe permanently and formed an artists' group called "Los Cinco Pintores" (the five painters) with Mruk, Fremont Ellis, Willard Nash and Will Schuster. Los Cinco Pintores was Santa Fe's first Modernist art group and produced works that depicted specifically American subjects such as the New Mexico landscape, local adobe architecture and Native American ceremonial dances

Joseph Slawinski, scrafitto artist and sculptor who died in 1983, did murals at Assumption Roman Catholic Church, the Stella Niagara Mother House Chapel, Daemon College, and the Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima in Lewiston New York. The Polish Arts Club is raising money to move and restore a 18 x 12 foot mural currently on an exterior wall of a building at Graycliff in Derby NY. They plan on moving it to Assumption Church on Amherst Street. The mural depicts St. Joseph Calasanctius, founder of the Parist Priests who owned Graycliff for a number of years. Visit http://bfn.org/~pacb/projects/graycliff/ for details of the mural and the project. See http://bfn.org/~pacb/projects/maid/ for additional photographs of his work at his home in Niagara Falls NY

Louis F. Dlugosz, (1915 - 2002). The sculptor-steelworker's only formal art training was at the old Art Institute of Buffalo. After serving two years in the U.S. Army, he returned home and launched his career. Using his "pretzel-bending" technique, Dlugosz rolled clay into strips and bent them together for a lattice-work effect, resulting in sculpture with an open rather than a solid interior His work was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Beaux-Arts School and the Louvre in Paris. In 1982, his bust of Lech Walesa - surrounded by bars because the Polish labor leader was jailed by the Communist regime - was blessed by Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. A bust of kidnapped American reporter (Batavia New York native) Terry Anderson in chains was displayed in a downtown Batavia New York Mall until his release from a Lebanese prison. The chains were smashed by Anderson during a visit to his hometown.

From his early days as the "pretzel-bending sculptor" to his visits with Pope John Paul II, Dlugosz attracted attention - and often controversy - wherever he went. His most enduring mode of protest was to dress in a toga as the Greek cynic Diogenes, carrying a silver lantern and "looking for an honest man," whether it was on the streets of Lackawanna or on the steps of Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Probably his most outrageous protest came shortly after his retirement from Bethlehem Steel Corp., when he demonstrated in 1963 outside Roswell Park Cancer Institute, chiding scientists for refusing to take seriously a theory that the color of the environment - "too bright, too bright" - caused cancer.

Dlugosz created a life-sized sculpture of Sioux leader Sitting Bull in 1994, demonstrating his new medium of gluing small pieces of wood together in an "open" style. The Lackawanna City Council approved its display in the lobby of City Hall. For more on this often controversial artist see http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~adg8/

Other famous Polish-American artists from the Buffalo area are Marion M. Rzeznik, an ecclesiastical painter of numerous WNY churches, and architect Joseph E. Fronczak.