Phyllis Kozlowski has taken on many roles during her life – teacher, artist, historian, equestrian, tennis player, pianist and tour guide – but it’s her art that has taken center stage recently, thanks to an exhibit that opened last month at McCord Gallery and Cultural Center in Palos Park.
About 150 people came to an artist’s reception Aug. 29 for the Orland Park resident’s work, which will be displayed until Sept. 20, and she sold quite a few of her pieces.
“People came who I hadn’t seen in years. A lot of my students and even one I had at Moraine,” Kozlowski said. “My endocrinologist came! I couldn’t believe it. And the president of Wendell (Boats) came. I was really impressed.”
Among those who are impressed by the artist is Carol Trzcinski, McCord’s executive director. “It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with Phyllis on this exhibit and to feature her beautiful artwork in our gallery,” she said. “Her many years of experience, neverending talent and enthusiasm has only heightened the reputation of McCord Gallery & Cultural Center.”
Kozlowski has been teaching watercolor classes for students at all levels since 2004, when McCord opened. She also had a hand in that, having served on the board during the process after meeting some students from Palos Park taking classes at Moraine Valley Community College, where she taught classes and was chair of the Fine Arts and Humanities Department.
“She has a strong following of students from across the suburbs,” Trzcinski said. “Phyllis is a very skilled watercolor artist, but is also a great communicator. She teaches through demonstrations as well as individualized attention and brings out the best in her students,” she added. “She communicates through her artwork as well. When viewing her paintings you are transported into the scene or location.”
Kozlowski loves painting old buildings and architectural structures, but overall, her inspiration is the natural world. “I love to capture the spontaneity of nature. My pieces aren’t real tight, but they’re bold and free. I have a great sense of color,” she said.
In college, she worked in oil paint, and some of her work was in a major gallery. The demands of teaching, however, meant less time for her own painting. Watercolor allowed her to be spontaneous, and she’s painted on location in other states as well as Portugal and Italy, mostly when she was involved with the Hinsdale Center for the Arts.
Kozlowski, now 81, keeps busy at arts centers, teaching watercolor classes at McCord, Hinsdale Community House and the LaGrange Art League.
She said her love of art was spurred by her love of horses and drawing them. In fact, earlier in life, she worked for the Oak Brook School of Horsemanship, a top riding academy, teaching jumping classes and managing the office.
Kozlowski, who grew up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago and attended Lourdes High School, was the first in her family to attend college, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Mundelein College (now part of Loyola University), a master’s degree from Northern Illinois University and a Ph.D in art education from The Ohio State University.
She landed her first job in college in 1965-66 at St. Elizabeth Seton in South Holland, teaching English, religion and a few art classes as the school was brand new. She earned a teaching certificate and then taught at Reavis High School in Burbank.
She moved on to higher education in 1972, hired by Moraine Valley in its early days of offering humanities classes. She taught art history and studio classes, but her colleagues were more interested in studio sessions, not wanting to prepare tests, a requirement of history classes. “I got stuck with it and I fell in love with it,” Kozlowski recalled.
During her tenure there, she expanded the program to include non-Western art, such as Japanese and African artists. She also was “very involved” in establishing the college’s fine arts center, including helping get some referendums passed to help fund it. Although the college’s president only wanted to build a theater, she eventually got to work with architects to create an art space as well. “I’m very proud of that building,” she said. “I also directed the Robert Caprio Gallery. He was a graphic designer and his parents decided to make a donation for the gallery in his name.”
Before retiring from Moraine Valley in 2001, she was hired at DePaul University and wrote a course related to her work as education director in the gallery at the Illinois State Museum of Art in Lockport. “I wrote a museum course that wasn’t about the collection – it was about how museums function, how they get their collection – for the School for New Learning at DePaul. I taught (online) it for 28 years as an adjunct instructor” as well as other classes.
While with DePaul, she got a job that lasted for 18 years teaching art history at Elmhurst University, and she spent 10 years teaching art history courses at Concordia University before deciding to stop teaching art history and focus on watercolor classes, something she’d done all along.
In the 1980s, she lived in Burr Ridge and worked with people in Hinsdale, including starting the Hinsdale Center for the Arts. Since its closure, she has taught at Hinsdale Community House.
“I’ve taught thousands of students over the years,” she said.
Equally at home on land and on water, Kozlowski began volunteering with the Chicago Architecture Foundation in the 1980s as an architecture guide. “I was one of the first boat tour guides for the foundation,” she said. Next, she worked for another boat tour company for about a decade until a friend of hers, the marine director at Wendella Boats, said that company wanted to expand its offerings.
Wendella hired Kozlowski, and she wrote its tour script and trained its guides. “I used to be there full time, but now I’m just there two days a week,” she said. She typically gives three 90-minute tours a day with a 30-minute break.
“She’s one of the most brilliant women I know,” Wendella owner Mike Borgstrom said, adding that she’s been leading tours with Wendella for 22 years but given tours of Chicago’s waterways closer to 40 years and has trained about 75 Wendella tour guides.
“Phyllis is very well-known and revered in our industry. She is the gold standard,” he said. “Staff have referred to her as a true and authentic Chicago legend: brilliant, a treasure, legendary, awesome. … Many tour guides have come to Wendella to learn from her and work with her. I wish I had 20 more just like her, but there is only one Phyllis.”
He said customers “enthusiastically cheer and applaud after every tour, every time.” Perhaps it’s because the company still uses the original descriptions – with updates along the way – that she created decades ago.
In her life, she’s had some amazing experiences, including playing competitive tennis and coaching at Moraine Valley back in the 1980s. In the 1980s, she and a friend played some exhibition tennis together against famed tennis player Bobby Briggs at the Evergreen Tennis Club. “The first ball I served, he missed it!” she said. “It was an experience.”
Last year, Rhodes Scholar, which takes senior groups all over the world, hired Kozlowski to lead the Chicago tour. She’s familiar with such groups, having led tours when she was at Moraine for 12 years, taking Renaissance students to Rome, Poland and Belgium before being hired by TravelLearn and visiting China, Egypt and Italy.
Kozlowski hopes people are inspired by what they do. “There’s not a day in my life that I didn’t feel like I really love what I do. Maybe I’m fortunate because I found my inner self, but I did,” she said, adding that the social and supportive aspects of classes are important, as well as providing an opportunity to create.
“Everybody has creativity,” she shared. “It’s part of our human nature. We need that, especially this day and age. I think what art does is humanize people. It also teaches us to look and appreciate the world.”
Melinda Moore is a freelance reporter.