Maggy Rozycki Hiltner
Red Lodge, Montana
Requiem, 2016
Embroidery, cotton quilt

Requiem was made from a beautiful pre-war quilt that was given to me by a family friend. This quilt pattern is called “Catch Me If You Can” or “Whirligig.” The quilt was in pristine condition, despite being over 100 years old, because it had been packed away after the Nazi appropriation of this symbol in the 1920s. Much of the Western world associates the swastika with hate, fascism, racism, and the Holocaust.

The swastika has been used for thousands of years as a good luck or auspicious symbol. Twenty years of Nazi association has destroyed its positive power to so many. A number of North American manufacturers in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries produced ceramic tiles with a swastika design. They were often installed in repeating patterns or in combination with related ancient symbols. There have been many post-World War II efforts to remove this symbol from buildings, many which are on our National Register of Historic Places.

Will this symbol ever again be fully accepted? Should it be? Did the evils of the Nazi regime ruin it?

I don’t think this quilting pattern will ever recover. There are even websites devoted to not “accidentally” piecing it. With this in mind, as well as the trend to try to remove the symbol from pre-war architecture, I carefully trimmed and picked the swastikas from the quilt. The raw insides of the quilt are showing. I hope my memorial for this quilt pattern shows my sense of loss and reverence for this issue and all events related to it.

Bio
Maggy Rozycki Hiltner loves to create images that at first appear whimsical or vibrantly happy but on closer inspection are not quite so. Sometimes it’s a malicious undertone to the relationships, or a lack of self-control on the part of the characters, or maybe an otherworldliness hidden in the everyday. She likes how this subtext works against the comfortable and innocuous medium of fabric and stitching. Maggie has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture from Syracuse University.

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