Ewa Chojecka

Ewa Chojecka

Ewa Sabine Chojecka (born April 13, 1933 in Bielsko-Biała ) is a doctor of art historian and Prof. em. from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow.

Ewa Sabine Chojecka was born in Bielitz / Bielsko in Poland in 1933, where she still lives today. She graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków in 1955 with a degree in art history. She received her doctorate there in 1959 and spent the following year as a Ford Foundation scholarship holder at the Warburg Institute at the University of London . In 1969 she completed her habilitation.

Ms. Chojecka worked from 1958 to 1977 as a research assistant at the university museum and the cultural history institute.

From 1977 to 2003 Ewa Chojecka was the holder of the Chair of Art History at the University of Silesia in Katowice, which she founded and helped to develop .

There she was appointed associate professor in 1987 and full professor in 1996.

Subsequently, from 2006 to 2013, she was in charge of the chair for the protection of cultural heritage at the Silesian Jerzy Ziętek University of Management in Katowice.

Chojecka is a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and has served on its Art History Committee for three terms.

Its main merit is the development of cultural and historical complexes of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially industrial architecture and classical modern architecture . She always viewed the phenomena of regional art history in a pan-European context, as was shown by her commitment to the redesign of the Silesian Museum in Katowice in 1993 with the exhibition "Protestant Art in Upper Silesia".

In 1988 she became a co-founder of the working group of German and Polish art historians and preservationists. In the following year, she founded the Upper Silesian Federation ( Związek Górnośląski ) out of her commitment to the cultural and historical heritage of the region , which is dedicated to the popular mediation of Upper Silesian cultural assets.

Ewa Chojecka is a member of the Evangelical Research Academy Hanover and was president of the Polish Evangelical Society in Bielsko / Bielitz in the 1990s. In addition, she is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Silesian Museum in Görlitz and the City Museum in Katowice, as well as chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Silesian Museum in Katowice and the Castle Museum in Bielsko-Biała .

As the leader of Upper Silesian cultural history research, Ewa Chojecka has been and is receiving numerous awards for her achievements and commitment. She was honored for her work in 1989 with the Order Polonia Restituta (Order of the Rebirth of Poland), in 1991 with the Karol Miarka Prize and in 2005 with the »Silesian Emerald« of the Evangelical Diocese of Katowice.

In 2006, she was the first to receive the newly established Augustin Weltzel Prize "The Upper Silesian Tacitus" from the Movement for the Autonomy of Silesia . In 2009 she received the award for the promotion of art of the Silesian Voivodeship .

In recognition of her services, Chojecka will be honored with the Georg Dehio Culture Prize of the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe on October 17, 2013 in Berlin .

Publications in German

• Protestant art in Upper Silesia. Promotion and crisis situations. At the current state of research. (Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Upper Silesia. The effects on politics, art and culture in the East Central European context. Conference series of the Haus Oberschlesien Foundation, Berlin 1994)
• Upper Silesian architectural tendencies 1900–1939 as a context for Bruno Taut. (Symposium Bruno Taut. Work and life stages. Appreciation and critical consideration, Magdeburg 1996)
• Upper Silesia as an internationally oriented art landscape. (Archive for Silesian Church History. Ed. J. Kohler, Aschendorff Münster 2006)
• Ideology-related debates about facts and myths in the Silesian border area: Katowice monument art and the German-Polish and Polish-Polish syndrome. (Visual cultures of remembrance and historical constructions in Germany and Poland since 1939, Volume V, Eds. M. Omilanowska, D. Bingen, PO Loew, D. Popp, Warszawa 2009).
• Sztuka Górnego Sląska od średniowiecza do końca XX wieku. 2nd Edition. Katowice 2009 - the extensive publication on the history of art in Upper Silesia that Ewa Chojecka brought out with her students Jerzy Gorzelik, Irma Kozina and Barbara Szczypka-Gwiazda, also contains a German summary.