A new immigrant experience, a reading about Pilgrims and Indians, that was assigned to an artist in her English language class led her to research the relationship between rituals of national glorification and enduring silence about genocide in the commemoration of Thanksgiving.
In a series American as a Second Language, Krzykawska decodes the history, national mythmaking, commemoration, and new spirituality of her new homeland, the United States.

In “Beuys, Coyote, and Turkey” work Kasia Krzykawska addresses Thanksgiving’s dilemmas by alluding to Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance I Like America, and America Likes Me, in which he locked himself in a cell with a live coyote, an indigenous animal, to “discuss” troubling American politics.
She creates a still scene with a turkey on a table, where Coyote and Beuys meet again in year 2021, that marks 400 years (according to American national myth/history) since the first Thanksgiving meal, and 100 years since the artist Joseph Beuys’ birth.

In the installation “American as a Second Language” (machinaloci, Berkeley, 2021), on two different parts of the gallery shopwindow, she quotes fragments from The 1776 Report by the President’s Trump Advisory 1776 Commission (which was released on January 18, 2021, a few days before the exhibition), and Gordan’s poetry read during the President Biden inauguration. She treats the shopfront window of machinaloci space as a sketchbook for quotes and thoughts that she gathered while adapting to a new land, new histories, and new cultural codes.

The work Stream (video, installation, 2022) is based on personal experience but is documentary in nature. The names that are present on the screen and in the flyers are those of more than sixty groupings, communities, associations, and spiritual collectives that she visited after moving to the San Francisco cultural circle. Most of them locate themselves outside mainstream religions, or in their far spectrum, and were founded in the last half of twenty century.