COURAGE

connecting collections

Ákos Szepessy is a fine artist and typographer and a member of the Association of Hungarian Artists (MAOE). He has had several exhibitions of his works since 1990, both in Hungary and abroad. He runs a well-known Polish pub, which is also an exhibition space and bookstore, with his wife, Marzena Jagielska, who is of Polish origins. The Gdańsk Bookstore Café is a place often involved in various performative and artistic acts. For instance, the café is running the “One Picture Gallery,” where visitors can contemplate a single piece of contemporary art while consuming some Polish specialty. There are Polish-language books on sale, including a good selection of Hungarian books translated into Polish.

Zsófia Júlia Szilágyi (1972–) is a literary historian and curator of the Ferenczy Museum in Szentendre.

She received her MA diploma in Hungarian Language and Literature (1999) as well as Art History (2012) from the Loránd Eötvös University (ELTE), Budapest. Following her studies, she took an active part in research and editorial work of a number of critical editions of twentieth-century Hungarian classics (correspondence of Mihály Babits, diaries of Zsigmond Móricz and Milán Füst, collected poems of Domos Szilágyi). As an editor of Fekete Sas Publishers, she launched a new series of books showcasing some young literary historians’ PhD dissertations on prominent Hungarian writers. In the meantime, as an outside collaborator, she also took part in a number of philological and publishing projects of the Petőfi Literary Museum (PIM) in Budapest.

Later on, after she received her diploma in Art History (ELTE 2012), she became a head of the newly established Literary Department of the Ferenczy Museum, Szentendre. Its main task and concept since 2015 has been to prepare exhibitions in Szentendre – a traditional center of visual arts and a number of local collections – by opening up new dimensions for contemporary literature and intermedial contexts. This was the main idea in fact for the exhibition “The Prohibited Journal ‘World in Move,’ 1975–1983,” which she curated in late 2016 and early 2017. The next one to open in mid-February 2018 was a similar venture presenting to the public the neo-avantgarde Hungarian art and literary periodical Új Symposion (New Symposium), edited and published in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia, before 1990.

Further exhibitions curated by Zsófia Szilágyi as events of the Ferenczy Museum’s ‘Art Capital’ festival are: Titorelli faiskolája (Titorelli’s Tree Nursery) by Ottó Tolnai, 2017; Városvégi filmek (Suburban Films) by Anna Szigethy, 2016; and Köztünk marad (This Should Remain between Us) by Viola Fátyol, 2016.

Taras Szmagala, Sr. is an active member of the Ukrainian community in Cleveland, OH, where he was born in 1935. He received his BA from Allegheny College in 1955 and an MA from John Carroll University in 1967, after which he held a number of management positions at US Steel in Cleveland, for Parma Public Schools, and later  V.P. for Government Relations and Assistant General Manager at the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. Szmagala Sr. worked on a number of political campaigns, including Robert Taft Jr and Richard Nixon, while also holding leadership positions in various community organizations, including the United Ukrainian Organizations of Ohio, as a member of the board for the Ukrainian Credit Union, the Ukrainian Museum Archives and others. 

In 1991, Szmagala Sr. was appointed by President George H. W. Bush as a representative from the Ukrainian-American community as part of the official delegation that went to Kyiv for the opening of the memorial for the Babyn Yar Massacre in 1941. That year he also organized a meeting at the White House with President Bush after Ukraine's declaration of independence, shortly after which the White House recognized the country as a sovereign state. 

Despite the lack of formal eduction in photography, Leonard Szmaglik became one of the most important photographers in the history of Gdansk (Poland).

For 30 years Szmaglik worked in Gdansk Shipyard, but since childhood photography has been his passion, which he cultivated since the 1950s. He photographed everything and everywhere. The still-growing collection of his pictures documents over five decades of official events (visits of Fidel Castro or Charles de Gaulle, state parades and celebrations), as well as everyday life scenes: shop windows, erections of new buildings, rock festivals, markets and fairs. His photos show the journey that Gdansk and its inhabitants underwent on a way to freedom.

Szmaglik's pictures were presented on numerous exhibitions and the photographer was appreciated for his works, eg. with the Prize of the Mayor of Gdansk for the merits for the city.

Szmaglik contributed to the Photographic Collection of European Solidarity Centre (ECS) in Gdansk with a huge number of his photographs, which make only a part of the photographer's vast portfolio.

Photographer active on the Polish press market for 40 years. 
One of founders and collectors of the collection of the Association of Documentalists "The Road", engaged in its activities since 2008.
He worked as a photojournalist for "Świat Młodych" (Eng. "Youth's World"), a youth style magazine popular in socialist Poland. He photographed social and political life in Poland in socialism and after 1989. When "Świat Młodych" had closed down in 1989, he was forced to cooperate with various magazines that were left on Polish press market.