Marie Watt Studio

Dwelling
2006

96×66×84 in.
Reclaimed and new wool blankets, satin binding, manila tags, safety pins
Collection of The Cantor Art Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA
Photograph by Kevin McConnell

This piece includes over 1,000 blankets collected from the community of Ridgefield, CT. With the help of a senior center, four hundred new blankets had bindings sewn on and were incorporated into the piece, later to be donated to local social service organizations. Peter Kubicek, a concentration camp survivor, donated his camp-issued blanket. (Head Trautmann, Rebecca, “Marie Watt’s Forget-me-not : Stitched in Wool, a More Human War Memorial” (2012). Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings.

Detail

Peter Kubicek and Marie Watt, 2006
Photograph by The New York Times

“The stories of the blankets Watt collects are sometimes quite extraordinary and unexpected. For a 2006 exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, she solicited donations of blankets from the community, along with the stories or memories associated with them. Hundreds of donated blankets were stacked flat rather than folded for a piece titled Dwelling, which suggested a large, minimalist cube. One particularly scratchy and ragged brown blanket was contributed by a man named Peter Kubicek, a Holocaust survivor who revealed that it had been issued to him in 1945 as a prisoner at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It had provided his only shelter from the elements when he and the other prisoners were forced to march north from the camp in advance of the approaching Allies. Kubicek carried the blanket with him when he moved to the United States as a young adult and went on to use it to wrap and protect artworks and other treasured purchases as he transported them home in his car, in effect reclaiming the blanket and redefining its role in his life. A collector of contemporary art and a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he saw Watt’s use of the blanket in her work as ‘a sweet and satisfying ending’ for this memento of his ‘previous life.’”

Rebecca Head Trautmann, “Marie Watt’s Forget-me-not: Stitched in Wool, A More Human War Memorial” (2012). Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings. 750.