Anna VA Polesny, a Pioneer of Wearable Art
Artist Anna VA Polesny and her International Levi’s. Photograph by Otto Stupakoff © Julie Schafler Dale.
By Majda Kallab Whitaker | Working at her country studio in upstate New York, Czech-American artist Anna VA Polesny creates attention-getting “wearable art” in a revival of the art form that swept America over 50 years ago. An early work, her International Levi’s, embellished with embroidered iconography from her travels, won a prize in the Levi’s Denim Art Contest in 1974. Now they are one of the highlights of an upcoming survey exhibition presented by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Off the Wall: American Art to Wear.
“I’ve always loved art... because my parents were in medicine I never felt free to pursue art... by teaching art, I think I created a really strong foundation for ultimately pursuing art. ”
Inspired in part by traditional embroideries and handcraft customs of her native Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), Polesny first pursued her artistic projects in denim and other textiles in the free-spirited 1960s and 1970s. Following time out for raising a family and contributing to the arts in many other ways, she returned to her creative career and continues expanding her horizons as a dedicated maker of wearable art today.
Polesny’s eye-popping shorts - with bright hand-embroidered butterflies, a horse, and a rooster - are a decidedly contemporary take on the Czech folk costume (“kroj” in Czech) style. Along with a jacket, they are prominently featured in the Philadelphia Museum survey opening on November 10. The exhibit “celebrates the astonishing inventiveness of a generation of mixed media artists who pioneered a new art form designed around the body.” Having recently expanded her studio, Polesny and her creative team now work with leather, silk, and other textiles to create original and adventurous articles of clothing and hangings, each hand made and one of a kind, still paying homage to her roots in Central European art and craft.
Polesny has travelled to the Czech Republic several times recently, in connection with the Czechoslovak Centennial Celebration. In October, she returned to celebrate the centennial of the founding of the Gymnasium Doktora Karla Polesneho in Znojmo, the first in former Czechoslovakia to offer instruction in the Czech language, founded by her grandfather, and to Prague and Znojmo to deposit her rich family archives, including those of her internationally decorated Olympian grandmother, Marie Provaznikova, with the Czech National Archive and the Znojmo City Archive.
Polesny’s family arrived in the United States as part of the post-1948 wave of emigration. “We escaped from Czechoslovakia and were in German refugee camps,” Polesny said in an interview for The Daily Gazette. “Refugees are looking for a foundation… at that time there was a three year waiting period to get to the United States and my parents wanted to work, not just stay in the camp.” Her parents, Karel and Alena Polesny MD, found work in the medical corps of the West Pakistani Army, said Polesny, adding “My mother was a captain and my father was a major. It was the first time in her whole life, my mother had to obey my father.”
Her grandmother, Marie Provaznikova, was a renowned Sokol gymnast, gold-medal-winning Olympic coach, founding President of the International Women’s Olympic Committee, first Olympian to defect to the West, and a leader of the Czech community in exile. Provaznikova, who died in 1991 at age 100, lived to see the Velvet Revolution and the return of democracy that she fought for throughout her life, providing an inspiration to her compatriots and family.
Staying in touch with the Czech community in New York, Polesny is affiliated with Sokol and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, and in Washington D. C., with the American Friends of the Czech Republic.