American Artist’s Exhibition Opens at Dom Polonii

September 30, 2008

John David Ratajkowski

John David Ratajkowski’s portrait collection entitled: “About Face: Conversations Recollected” will be shown for a month at Dom Polonii, Rynek Glowny 14, Krakow.  The opening reception will take place at 6pm on October 1.  A native Californian, Ratajkowski divides his time now between San Diego, Mallorca and Ireland.  His work has been shown both in the U.S and overseas.  Ratajkowski’s interpretation of marginalized cultures fuelled one aspect of his artistic orientation and produced three distinct bodies of work. The first of these was a series of black American blues musicians, exhibited in Poland during the Solidarity period.  The second was an exhibition of large black and white portraits of Alzheimer’s patients funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, while the third was a show and an accompanying symposium funded by the California Council for the Humanities of painted photo collages and portraits of European Gypsy communities which the artist had visited and in which he worked.