Curator Name: Izabela Gola
Residency Dates: September – October 2024
Hometown: Kielce, Poland
Lives & Works: New York City metropolitan area
URL: LinkedIn | Instagram @izabelagola
Education: Hunter College, The City University of New York, Masters of Fine Arts 2012-2015, Recipient of Eleanor Gay Lee Award and the Tadeusz Kościuszko Scholarship
Bio/Statement:
Izabela Gola (b. Poland) is a New York-based curator, advisor, public speaker, and artist, leading Visual Arts and Design at the Polish Cultural Institute New York since 2016. Gola’s multidisciplinary practice engages contemporary visual arts and cultural diplomacy and centers on human rights and ecology, well-being in today’s urgent humanitarian and environmental crises, through an intersectional feminist lens. Gola has led PCINY programs in collaboration with major U.S. arts institutions, including MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, The New Museum, Residency Unlimited, A.I.R., Dallas Contemporary, Hauser & Wirth, The Kitchen, NYC Parks & Antiquities, MIT List, Hudson Valley MOCA, CUNY Graduate Center, the Armory Show, and Frieze Art Fair.
One of the recurring international programs, ECO Solidarity (2020-ongoing) with ICFF held in May at the Javits Center in NYC, focuses on ethics and sustainability in design and architecture of urban habitats. The most recent exhibitions include, Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics at Peninsula (Jan 23 – Mar 7, 2025) Skin Deep at Residency Unlimited (Oct 18 – 27, 2024), and Kus + Libera at Thomas Erben (Sept 7-Oct 21, 2023).
Since January 2024, Gola has curated Nirbhaya monument/antimonument, a long-term public project by New York-based Polish artist Monika Weiss. Scheduled to open at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, this memorial honors forgotten victims of gender-based violence. Created in response to global violence against women, Weiss’ Nirbhaya provides a space for reflection and fosters activism, rejecting patriarchal monumentality in favor of a peaceful future. Gola will develop programs centered on human rights and elimination of violence against women in collaboration with the World Council of Peoples for the United Nations.
Before joining the Polish Cultural Institute New York, Gola served as Art Exhibitions Manager at the French Institute Alliance Française (2012–2016), an assistant to the curatorial team at MoMA PS1 (2012–2013), and was a co-founder and co-host of I ART New York, a radio podcast on Radio Free Brooklyn (2019–2021).
As a visual artist, Gola explores memory, identity, and displacement through multimedia narrative environments. Her work incorporates porcelain, sculpture, video, oil painting, and installation. A dual Polish-U.S. citizen, Gola earned her MFA in Multidisciplinary Art Installations from CUNY Hunter College (2015) and received the Eleanor Gay Lee Award and the Tadeusz Kościuszko Scholarship.
Selected Curatorial Projects:
- Nirbhaya monument/antimonument by Monika Weiss at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, is an ongoing public project dedicated to victims of gender-based violence which includes an outdoor sculpture, underwater video projection, and performances. Named after Jyoti Singh Nirbhaya, aligning with the UN’s 5th Sustainable Development Goal, it calls for activism to end violence against women globally. This project is curated independently from PCINY programs.
- Jan Baracz: twilight mechanics (January 23 – March 7, 2025) solo exhibit of Jan Baracz offers a window into the unconscious, using materials sourced from the fringes of industrial production to explore the impact of the Anthropocene. The exhibit examines the collapse of familiar narratives and their effect on the individual psyche. Engaging with disjointed materials, Baracz’s works redirect the gaze inward, revealing submerged aspects of the self. Poetic and associative re-framings probes the ways in which perceptions of reality are disfigured by the cascading crises of civilization, offering a transformative lens on the self in a state of collapse.
- Skin Deep (October 18 – 27, 2024) in conjunction with Anna Orbaczewska RU residency, featured four European artists, Eros Dibra (Albania), Anna Orbaczewska (Poland), Viktor Petrov (Bulgaria), and Milica Zhivkovic (Montenegro), Residency Unlimited alumni, whose works through various ways of expression and mediums navigate the body as a site of memory and resistance. The exhibit reimagines the body as a vessel, a lyrical conduit for reflecting on the construct of selfhood, constantly evolving yet deeply rooted in the complexities of trauma, memory, and identity.
- ECO Solidarity since 2020, a yearly initiative curated by Gola in collaboration with Odile Hainaut at the ICFF during NYCxDESIGN week, which addresses global ecological and humanitarian crises and promotes human-centered sustainable solutions featuring exhibits, panels, and workshops. This provocative cultural intervention into the commercial design fair emphasizes ethics and sustainability in innovative design and architecture. ECO Solidarity is fueled by the EUNIC Global Cluster Grant in partnership with the European Union National Institutes for Culture. ICFF website
- Kus + Libera, a two-person exhibit at Thomas Erben Gallery (September 7-October 21, 2023), juxtaposes young figurative painter Agata Kus and renowned conceptual artist Zbigniew Libera. The exhibit contrasts their responses to different socio-political contexts, highlighting the dialogue between generations and political systems.
- MoMA post presents: Art, Resistance, and New Narratives in Response to the War in Ukraine Museum of Modern Art (February 24, 2022) This MoMA panel explored artistic responses to the war in Ukraine from 2014 to the 2022 Russian invasion. Artists, researchers, and historians analyzed art reflecting on the Maidan revolution, Crimea’s annexation, and the Donbas occupation, offering insights into an evolving archive that documents atrocities while proposing new narratives for art history. Co-curated with Inga Lace (C-MAP MoMA) and moderated by Paulina Pobocha (MoMA).
- Orgé by Monika Weiss, part of To Freedom exhibition at Furlong Gallery, University of Wisconsin-Stout (November 7, 2022 – January 9, 2023), is a choral site-specific interactive installation curated in resistance to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inspired by ancient lament traditions it is dedicated to the victims of wars and colonialism. Orgé will be exhibited at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum, Missouri Botanical Garden, in September 2024.
- New Renaissance in Feminist Art, a panel series in collaboration with Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, A.I.R., Barnard College, and lokal 30 gallery (March 2021), addressed women’s rights activism through visual arts. Inspired by the #MeToo movement and political events in Poland and the USA, it honored Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy. Panels featured prominent figures like Agnieszka Rayzacher, Joan Snitzer, Jenée-Daria Strand, Anna Orbaczewska, Rotem Reshef, and Sheetal Prajapati, discussing the evolution and challenges of feminist activism.
