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Richard Filipowski (1923-2008) was a mid-century artist, designer, and educator.

Early Life

Richard Filipowski was born to Polish parents Michalina Bisek and Severyn Filipowski. When Richard Filipowski was three-years-old, his father secured a job in demolition in Terra Cotta, just outside of Ontario, Canada. Severyn moved from Poland to Canada in 1926, and his wife and three children followed by the start of the following year. Richard became known as "Dick" when the family settled in Canada. When Dick nine-years-old, the quarry in Terra Cotta where Severyn was employed shut down. Severyn decided to move his family to Toronto, where Dick attended the Niagara Street School. Here he began whittling small airplanes and boats, as well as painting watercolors. Later, he attended Central Technical High School in Toronto. During his senior year, he won a countrywide design competition for a new Canadian National Vimy Memorial poster. The summer following high school, he served as a camp counselor at Georgian Bay, where he painted landscapes in oil.

Richard Filipowski graduated in 1941. He was deferred from the draft because of extreme migraine headaches. Inspired by Bauhaus 1919-1928, a Walter Gropius-curated exhibition catalog from the Museum of Modern Art, Filipowski moved to Chicago in order to study under László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus. In Chicago, he became known as "Filip."

Teaching Career

At the New Bauhaus, Richard Filipowski became a protégé of founder László Moholy-Nagy, who featured several of Filipowski's works in his seminal text Vision in Motion (1947). Filipowski was the only student Moholy-Nagy called upon to join the faculty, where he taught alongside Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Recruited by Gropius to develop a course in design fundamentals at Harvard, which remains a cornerstone of design pedagogy to this day, he later moved to MIT where he taught for more than three decades, until his retirement in 1988.