The political wife who whittled trees into art

Emilie Brzezinski 1932–2022

Emilie Brzezinski’s family grew accustomed to the sound of a chainsaw. Initially known as the wife of Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter who became an elder statesman before his death in 2017, Brzezinski came to be renowned in her own right for hewing towering sculptures from tree trunks using chisels, axes, and chainsaws. Arch in Flight, her 14-foot bronze casting of a piece of wood shaped like the mathematical symbol for pi, stands near Washington’s Corcoran Gallery. Brzezinski said she was drawn to those trees— especially the ones stunted or struck by lightning—that have “a story to tell.”

Emilie Benes was born in Geneva, said The Washington Post, to a Czech diplomat father from a prominent family; her great-uncle was a Czech president. After World War II broke out, she fled with her parents to London and then to California. Brzezinski studied art at Wellesley College and took a job at a Harvard University library, where she met her future husband, also a child of East European diplomats. They settled in suburban Virginia, and she ran their home “like a small farm,” with dogs, chickens, ducks, and a horse.

Brzezinski continued carving trees into her 80s, said MSNBC.com. Her art sometimes drew on politics, including a 2014 hollow trunk lined with a giant photo of Ukrainian protesters. But her other life’s work was raising the children: Ian, a defense expert; Mark, the current U.S. ambassador to Poland; and Mika, co-host of MSNBC’s political talk show Morning Joe. “I was a political wife, but not quite the way you imagine,” she said in 2014. “I stayed with my kids; I stayed with my sculpture.”