Meeting with Alicja Kobza at the Toniebajka Bookstore in Bydgoszcz

Thursday, November 18, 2026, at 6:00 p.m.

The Toniebajka Bookstore in Bydgoszcz and the Polish Chamber of Books invite you to a meeting with Alicja Kobza, winner of the Independent Bookstores Literary Award and author of the book “Graphic Designers: Untold Stories of Polish Applied Graphic Designers, 1945–1989” / Karakter Publishing House.

This event is part of a project co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage through the Culture Promotion Fund—a state-administered special-purpose fund.

More about the project: www.pik.org.pl/nlkk

About the author:
Alicja Kobza—a graphic designer—specializes in designing visual identities, books, albums, posters, and digital materials. She has collaborated with cultural institutions in Poland and abroad, including Zachęta—the National Gallery of Art, the Center for Polish Sculpture in Orońsko, the Royal Łazienki, and the Museum of Art in Lucerne. She has created graphic designs for publications dedicated to the work of artists such as Mirosław Bałka, Roee Rosen, Guy Ben-Ner, and Stefan Gierowski. Since 2020, she has been leading a research project on forgotten female graphic artists from the People’s Republic of Poland era, carried out, among other platforms, on Instagram (@polish.female.designers). For her outreach efforts, she received the Special Award in the STGU Design of the Year Competition. She is a scholarship recipient from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

About the book:
“Graphic Designers: Untold Stories of Polish Women Applied Graphic Designers, 1945–1989”

They designed posters, book and vinyl record covers, logos, packaging, and advertising materials. The period of their most intense professional activity coincided with the times of the Polish People’s Republic. Well-educated, talented, and hardworking. Why haven’t their names gone down in the history of Polish graphic design?

For many years, Alicja Kobza collected archival materials and pieced together the life stories of these female designers. She spoke with the women featured in the book, their colleagues, and their families. She examined their bodies of work, trying to understand why their creative output had been overlooked or disregarded until now, and why, when discussing the history of Polish graphic design, we can only name their male colleagues, partners, and husbands. In the book, she profiles twenty-seven female artists and presents her own selection of their designs. She sheds light on the realities of their work, the dilemmas they faced, and the difficulties they had to overcome. She shows how their styles evolved and what they contributed to the world of graphic design.

This visually appealing and, at the same time, substantively pioneering work restores to us an erased part of our history—the history of the People’s Republic of Poland, the history of commercial art, and herstory.

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A Meeting with Alicja Kobza

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