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At the Rhode Island School of Design, students learn by studying design and artwork of the past. The collection of Polish posters in the RISD Library Graphic Design and Illustration Archive is one source of inspiration for student work. As visual and resource material librarian Mark Pompelia explains, the posters are “part of a tradition of object-based learning.” Professor and critic Jacek Mrowczyk uses them to teach composition, typography, image-text relation, and illustration, among other things. He tells us that those featured below are by Polish designers and were donated to RISD by Polish theorist Szymon Bojko. You can now browse the collection on JSTOR and find more work by these designers.

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A poster advertising Piotr Szulkin’s 1980 film “Golem”, presented by Polish Film and starring Marek Walczewski
A poster advertising IV Theater Confrontations – Polish Classics at Kochanowski Theater in Opole, 1978
A poster for the XVIth International Puppet Theatre Festival, Poland, 1994
A poster advertising a student hostel, the Hotel Almatur in Wroclaw, Poland
A poster for a performance of the ballet Coppelia, by Leo Delibes, at the Grand Theater in Warsaw
A poster for a circus in Poland
A poster advertising a group exhibition by Hungarian artists, organized by the Office of Artistic Exhibitions in Sopot (Poland), August 1970
A poster of Jimi Hendrix designed by Waldemar Swierzy
A poster for the Association of Polish Artists district of Warsaw, 1948
A poster for the Cuban documentary Luanda is not San Pablo, directed by Santiago Alvarez

Thanks also to Alecia Underhill, Materials + Picture Collections Supervisor at RISD, for her help on this piece.