The legacy of 50 years of creative Polish emigration in Canada after 1939 is a rich contribution to its culture and an important chapter in the post-war history of art in Poland. The 3-year work on the "Dictionary of Polish Visual Artists in Canada in the 20th Century" has been completed.

The fate of an emigrant is a long and difficult journey in a new society, in a different language and culture. The fate of the emigrant artist can be even more difficult if he or she intends to continue creating outside their own country... especially in a country considered a cultural desert before the war.

The Polish artistic community in Canada in the 20th century was fed by three successive waves of artists and intelligentsia, arriving just after the war, then in the period of the Polish People's Republic and during martial law in the 1980s. Initially, they represented mainly figurative painting, created in the post-impressionist style, and continued the Matejko school of realism, far from the Canadian taste for New York and the non-representational art created there. However, the outmoded academism and realism was losing out in competition with Groupe of Seven-style northern landscapes or abstract painting, hence Polish figurative sculptors often leaned towards abstraction and lyrical painters opted for surrealism. Nevertheless, Polish art was long permeated by an emotional patriotic-nostalgic element. Over the years, the art of our compatriots settled in Canada underwent a process of commercialisation. Artists went into graphic design, photography, multimedia, their own businesses combining art with industrial production. The demand for arts and crafts steered many towards ceramics, weaving, metalwork. Poles also obtained positions at art colleges, gave private painting lessons, participated in Canadian arts and crafts fairs, established galleries, organised exhibitions, and prepared lectures and conferences on Polish history, art and culture. In a word, they set the tone for Polish cultural and artistic life.

The result of a research project, carried out since 2018 under the direction of Prof. Dr. Jan W. Sienkiewicz, is the 'Dictionary of Polish Visual Artists Active Abroad in the 20th Century', in which Dr. Katarzyna Szrodt has rescued and consolidated knowledge of the work of Polish visual artists working in exile in Canada after 1939. The researcher looked for traces of native artistic activity in Polish centres in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Edmonton, Calgary, Hamilton and Vancouver. In the study report she prepared, K. Szrodt identified the nature and formation of the Polish artistic community. As part of her documentation work, she finally created a catalogue of 100 biographical entries of Polish artists supplemented with iconographic material, which will be made available in the digital resources of the Polonica Institute.