Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Dolores Slowinski. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Dolores, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What did your parents do right and how has that impacted you in your life and career?

My parents expected me to do my best throughout my education, My home life was secure and encouraging. My Mom probably would have been delighted to see me join a convent and become a nun; my Dad would have been delighted if I had become a medical technologist or engineer.

The convent life never appealed to me. And although I was good at the sciences, it was geometry that fascinated me because of the three dimensional shapes, the triangles, parallelograms etc, so much so that for a science project I made paper models of electron microscope images of viruses…dodecahedrons with pentagonal prisms on the corners! I was a semi-finalist. But when the judges spoke to me about the project, I admitted that I wanted to create visual aids/sculptures that would help people understand science. They thanked me and walked away.

I studied biology and chemistry in college which really helped me organize my thoughts and taught me the discipline in science, but my heart wasn’t in it. I took a drawing class one summer and had an amazing instructor. It changed my life! I told my parents that I wanted to study art. They thought it was not the best choice, but they supported my decision to change schools and majors.

I wanted to work with my hands and create something from scratch. I was happiest at holidays when our Polish traditions brought color and music and laughter into our home. My elementary and secondary school teachers incorporated art into every subject, which I loved. We painted holiday murals on blackboards with tempera paints and my parents found large sheets of paper so I could do that at home too and tape them up in the vestibule so that family coming over could see them.

In college I had a job working in the theatre shop and learned to build things and paint sets. I graduated with a degree in weaving and ceramics. As a graduation gift, I was able to accompany my Mom on an 8week trip to Poland and meet relatives from both sides of the family. It was amazing to meet artists in Poland and see their work. One of my Dad’s cousins had a flax wheel. My paternal grandfather was a shoe maker. Everyone in the family there were happy that I was in the arts. Needle and thread were in my DNA.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a studio artist. After college I had a couple of jobs that required travel throughout the midwest and the state of Michigan. I learned that in Kentucky and Tennessee, weaving and ceramics were not in the fine arts department as they were in Detroit, MI, but were part of the home economics department. In the near south, it was important that the home be a beautiful environment and that the home arts be accessible to everyone. That made an impression on me although I was not interested in becoming a production potter or weaver.

I traveled in Michigan with the Michigan Artrain and was the weaver and potter in residence as well as the Assistant Director of the train. I got to meet artists all over the state and also made a lot of community contacts at both art and historical museums. I also met my husband on Artrain!

Artrain was created by Gov. William Milliken and his wife, Helen. Gov. Milliken was a moderate Republican. His wife, Helen, was a great supporter of the arts in all its forms: visual, musical, theatrical, danced, and written. If it wasn’t for the Michigan Council for the Arts (MCA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) creatives in Michigan would not have had the opportunities to see their dreams come to fruition.

This prepared me for my next job as a Museum Coordinator position created at the MCA thanks to a grant from the NEA. This was in the early 1970s. That was the golden age for arts funding in this country. I know so many artists who benefited from the arts funding that was available at that time.

Artrain led me into arts administration for full-time work. As a Museum Coordinator, I traveled the state talking to museum directors and board members about funding available to them from the state and the federal government.

After working as a Museum Coordinator, I took a job as Assistant Director and then as Interim Director of the Saginaw Art Museum. It was a curatorial position and I learned a lot about organizing and mounting exhibitions.

In 1975, I married my Artrain sweetheart and in 1984 we had a baby girl. I became a stay-at-home Mom but took to writing art reviews for the New Art Examiner, local art journals, and even had one or two published in Art in America. Once my daughter was old enough to attend school, I volunteered there and did story telling making my own felt storyboard characters or drawing as I told the story.

But I was beginning to miss time in the studio. When my daughter left for college, I finally returned to studio practice in an attic room. I made beaded jewelry and tea cozies…saleable commodities…that had to pay for the supplies. I went to galleries and talked to the gallerists and finally got a break when I presented hand-stitched drawings and collages on notecards in a one night stand at Motor City Brewing Works in Detroit. A gallerist in Detroit, Simone DeSousa, whom I’d invited to the show came and offered me a wall in her gallery to create an installation of stitched cards on the wall. That was an opportunity I jumped at. I worked feverishly and stitched 110 cards between April 5th and August 31, 2010. I called it Threadlines Sketchbook. I learned so much in planning and executing that installation. And I realized that I could never have done it straight out of college. All my life experiences got me to that point. My organizational skills were sharp, my manual and planning skills were at their best, my imagination was on fire, and I had the time to execute it without interruption. I had no family obligations to distract me. I’d cared for my parents and in-laws until they died. My daughter was living and working in NYC. My husband was working. My time was mine. I was 63 and finally doing what I had dreamed of doing.

I primarily create hand-stitched, abstract drawings on paper. However, I have also created hand-stitched, hand-felted pieces that I call Flat Planet Universe. I combined these works as well as new ones for a solo show in 2018 that I called An Effervescent Universe of Stitched Phenomena after reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. The setting is the Second Chechen War. The landscape and the environment reminded me so much of Poland and what the people there experienced during WWII, that the story stayed with me. But unlike the darkness in the novel, my work was full of light so I played with his title and made it my own.

In 2022, I created another installation piece called: All Women Are Daphne. It is a line of 16 garlands of leaves suspended over a collection of 150 lbs of river rock and bearing the first names of over 850 women. It was inspired by the story of Daphne, who was turned into a laurel tree by one of her parents when she asked for help as she spurned the advances and pursuit of Apollo. As a result of being turned into a tree, she could no longer run free through the forest and observe the life there. She was rooted to one spot and still had to put up with Apollo’s attentions,

As a woman, I realized the all women have had to put up with unwanted advances, lack of parental understanding at times, and not have an identity of their own, not be addressed by their own name. All Women Are Daphne is my tribute to women all over the world in all cultures. I honor them with their first names. It also included hand-stitched, abstract portraits of women important in my life, interspersed among the leaves.

Currently I am working on another installation with a working title called: Not Your Grandmother’s Garden, that will address the importance of sex education in schools at all levels. The first sculpture in it has been completed and is called: The Garden of Human Variation. It contains text on paper leaves that address the differences in not only biological sex, but also gender identity, gender expression, attractional variation, and sexual practice and/or behavior as defined by and presented to psychologists

I am also in the midst of expanding my studio to include a wet felting area. My studio is in the house next door which we were able to purchase from our dear neighbor’s estate after her death in 2012. Until that point I had been renting space in a commercial building in Ferndale, MI which I could afford after applying for Social Security at age 62. It suited me for about a year and a half, but when our neighbor’s home went on the market, I decided that a commute across the backyard was preferable to a 30 minute drive.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

That drawing class I took in 1967 was interrupted by the rebellion that swept through Detroit. Institutional racism was part of Detroit’s history. It hit a flash point when a family gathering welcoming home a military veteran was raided by the Detroit Police as a supposed “blind pig” selling alcohol in an unlicensed establishment. The city made headlines as did many other cities across the country with “race riots” taking place. University classes were suspended. And the blame was put on the Black residents of the city. We lived in a white, Polish, Roman Catholic ghetto on Detroit’s west side. I came into contact with African Americans on busses and in stores downtown. But our neighborhood was not integrated.

I was aware of the prejudice of various relatives and challenged them about their views when they started talking in broad generalities about “those people.” When my parents suggested they sell their home, I told them if they moved, I would not come to visit because I was not afraid to live in Detroit and wanted to meet more African Americans and have them as neighbors.

My husband and I have seen our neighborhood “change” over the 45 years we have lived in our home. We are the only white family for several blocks. We have friends from many cultures and backgrounds and our life is richer for it. I love the diversity within Detroit. We have been here through its many struggles.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The fact that I am soon to be 78 and am still making art and expanding my studio is a tribute to my personal resilience. But my resilience is a reflection of the resilience of all people who have survived tough times. My maternal and paternal grandparents came to America as immigrants in their 20s. The husbands came first and found work and a place to live and then sent for their wives. They and their children, my parents survived the Depression of the 1930s as well as WWII. In comparison, I, like many of the baby boomers, grew up in an America that seemed unparalleled. But if my skin were a different color in the 1950s and beyond, I know my life experiences would have been very different which is why I treasure all our friends. Their stories and lives have fleshed out my limited experiences of life in Detroit, in Michigan, in America. We are better people thanks to them.

I was honored to be included in a project spearheaded and organized by Yvette Rock, an artist and activist in Detroit, who immigrated to the US from Suriname, She was a mentor to me and I to her as we exchanged the challenges of being artists with families. One of her projects was “Aired Out Quilts” which engaged two quilters, an author, videographers and photographers to record the stories of long-time residents of Detroit. I told her the story of our bicycle pump. We had a bicycle pump and children in the neighborhood came by with deflated basketballs, flat tires on their bicycles and rang our side doorbell. We helped them all, taught them how to attach the hose to the bike or insert the pin into the basketball or football, then hold the pump down with their feet on the stand and pump up and down until the item inflated.

This went on not only when our daughter was growing up, but continued when she was away at college. At first I knew and recognized the children, but eventually they were total strangers walking up and asking for the pump. Many years later, I learned that ours was “The Pump House.” Quilter April Anue Shipp was assigned to create a quilt that told our story after I had been interviewed. The videotaped interview became part of a film. The quilts were presented to us and the presentation filmed. I had no idea what the quilt would look like. When it was unrolled, I cried. There was a little brown boy sitting on the grass and I was handing him the pump. He’d dropped his bike on the sidewalk and was holding a deflated basketball in one had as he reached out for the pump with the other. I cried because I did not know where all the little African American boys who had come to our home were. Life for African American children is fraught with danger. They are judged by the color of their skin in a racist society. I even wondered if they were still alive.

The quilts were displayed during COVID when they were hung on the porches of the residents selected to be part of the project. It was a cold day in November, but it was wonderful to see people driving by to see the quilts and chat.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.doloresslowinski.com
• Instagram: @doloresslowinski
• Facebook: Dolores S. Slowinski

Image Credits

Portrait of Dolores taken by Nancy Rodwan.

Photo of #7 Slowinski_ Urbanization: The Bloodlust of the Built Environment was taken by Tim Thayer.

All other photos were taken by me.