Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz-Kosmowska (20 June 1930 – 20 April 2017) was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist. She was known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and her outdoor installations. She is widely regarded as one of Poland's most internationally acclaimed artists. She was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań, Poland, from 1965 to 1990 and a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles in 1984. Early life Magdalena Abakanowicz was born to a noble landowner family in Falenty. Her mother descended from old Polish nobility. Her father came from a Polonized Tatar family, which traced its origins to Abaqa Khan (a 13th-century Mongol chieftain). Her father's family fled Russia to the newly independent Poland after the October Revolution. She was the pioneer of fiber based sculpture and installation in 1960. The Polish-Soviet War forced her family to flee their home, after which they moved to the city of Gdańsk. When she was nine Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Poland. Her family endured the war years living on the outskirts of Warsaw and became part of the Polish resistance. At the age of 14 she became a nurse's aid in a Warsaw hospital; seeing that the impact of war first hand would later influence her art. After the war, the family moved to the small city of Tczew near Gdańsk, in northern Poland, where they hoped to start a new life. Under the newly-imposed communist doctrine, the Polish government officially adopted Socialist realism as the only acceptable art form which should be pursued by artists. It was originally conceived by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, and was Socialist and realist in nature. It had to be 'national in form' and 'socialist in content'. Other art forms being practiced at the time in the Western Bloc, such as Modernism, were officially outlawed and heavily censored in all Eastern Bloc nations, including Poland. Lack of official sanction did nothing to reduce her enthusiasm or alter the revolutionary course of her work. Education Abakanowicz completed part of her high school education in Tczew from 1945 to 1947, after which she went to Gdynia for two additional years of art school at the Liceum Sztuk Plastycznych in that city. After her graduation from the Liceum in 1949, Abakanowicz attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sopot (now in Gdańsk). In 1950, Abakanowicz moved back to Warsaw