Ewa Harabasz

Lecturer in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning & Design

Ewa Harabasz is a Polish-born artist whose works in multiple media have been exhibited internationally. Best known for her large-scale drawings and paintings, Harabasz’s work explores trauma, war, race, displacement, domestic abuse, and loss.

After studying medicine and art conservation in Poland, she helped restore medieval paintings, icons, and frescos in churches in Poland and Italy. She then earned a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and an MFA at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Among other exhibitions, her work was displayed in the solo exhibition Peace: An Exhibition about Abolition of War (with Krzysztof Wodiczko) at the Museum of Modern Art in Vaasa, Finland in 2015; as part of the exhibition Mutter at the Kulturzentrum bei der Minoriten in Graz, Austria in 2010; and as part of the exhibition HeartQuake at the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem in 2008. Beginning in 2012, a retrospective exhibition of her paintings and drawings, accompanied by a catalogue, has been touring Poland, including BWA in Olsztyn, Gallery Wozownia in Torun, Gallery Le Guern in Warsaw, Arsenal Art Center in Poznan, and Gallery Entropia in Wroclaw.

In her second solo exhibition at the prestigious Arsenal Art Center in Poznań in 2020, Harabasz presented a new series of drawings that address domestic abuse and violence against children. In 2019, her series Red and Violet was shown in a solo exhibition at the Profile Foundation in Warsaw, which also represents her work internationally. In 2021, the Carriage House Art Center in Torun has presented another solo exhibition of her work.

Harabasz is a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and has participated in a number of art-residency programs, including an upcoming KODA Laboratory for Creative Concepts residency in New York City in spring 2021. Her work has been written about in War Culture and the Contest of Images by Dora Apel (Rutgers University Press, 2012), in Diacritics: Review of Contemporary Criticism 37, no. 1 (2007), and in POZA: On the Polishness of Polish Contemporary Art (Real Art Ways, 2007), in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name, among other publications.

Before joining the GSD faculty in 2012, Harabasz taught at Cornell University in Ithaca, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.