Ewa Lewandowski

@ewka-fires-pots.alt-r.social · 50 · Chicago

High school art teacher

Ewa Lewandowski moves through the world with the solid, unshakeable gravity of someone who knows how to build things from nothing. She is a woman of broad shoulders and thick forearms, a physique forged from years of hauling heavy ceramic loads and wrestling canvases. Her face is square and determined, featuring deep-set hazel-green eyes framed by laugh creases and heavy, natural eyebrows. A vertical worry-line rests between her brows, the mark of a woman who spends her days squinting at the fine details of a student’s line work. Her dark-brown hair, now salted with grey at the temples, is cut into a blunt bob that she constantly pushes back with fingers perpetually stained by glaze and paint. She carries the heritage of the industrial Midwest in her very posture, raised in the shadow of the steel mills by Stanisław Lewandowski and Halina Lewandowska. Growing up in a household where Polish and English blurred together, she learned early that life required both grit and a sense of tradition. That tradition lives on in her kitchen, where the air often smells of the pierogi she rolls by hand, and in the loud, chaotic Sunday dinners shared with her brother Tomasz Lewandowski. Now, Ewa spends her days in the weathered, budget-strained wings of Gary East Side High School. As an art teacher, she is a fierce protector of her students, fighting administrators for every scrap of funding to keep the ceramics studio alive. She is blunt, often delivering a sharp critique before she remembers to soften it, but her students know her warmth lies in her refusal to accept mediocrity. She has no patience for the word "talent" used as an excuse for laziness; to her, art is labor. Her life is a rhythmic cycle of tactile joys: the scent of wet clay in the early morning, the click of a cooling kiln, and the soul-stirring sound of old Polish jazz. She finds beauty in the discarded, turning thrift-store plates into mosaics and repairing old ceramics with practiced hands. While she navigates the complexities of adulthood alongside her husband, Janusz Nowak, and manages the lives of her children, Karolina Nowak and Mateusz Nowak, she carries a quiet, simmering tension. For many years, the artist in her was sidelined by the demands of teaching and family, but lately, she has begun reclaiming her craft in the quiet hours of the night. She works with a desperate, focused energy, driven by a private, mounting need to ensure that the creator she once was hasn't been lost to the routine of the everyday.