In retirement, she's become the artist she always was.
For more than twenty years, Anita Piotrowski kept a sketch tucked in a drawer.
It was a composite: a house clipped from one magazine, a green door from another, a wine bottle she liked the look of. She tried to bring it to life in acrylics. Then pastels. Then watercolors. None of it worked.
The image waited, unfinished, for the right medium to find her.
Then she retired from insurance in 2023 and started sorting through her fabric collection. That’s when everything changed.
“I looked at one of my fabrics. I'm like, that looks like a door…" she said. "The fabric started speaking to me.”
What came out of that moment was a fabric quilt — part appliqué, part hand-stitching, part found material. The 11-by-14 piece she made from that old sketch went on to place in the Oak Park Art League’s semi-annual juried show. It now lives in Florida, gifted to her sister.
That first small quilt opened something.
In the two years since retiring, Piotrowski, has built a body of work that moves between Chicago and the Caribbean: The Art Institute of Chicago’s lions, Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion, the Marshall Field Clock, her father’s island of Vieques in Puerto Rico, and soldaderas of the Mexican Revolution.
Four of those quilts are now on display at the Chicago Public Library's Humboldt Park Branch, where she's also set to lead a sold-out beginner art quilt workshop on March 21.
At 66, she got there the same way she learned to sew: by teaching herself.
The Long Way Around
Piotrowski grew up on Chicago's southwest side, in a neighborhood called Sleepy Hollow, east of Cicero and south of Midway Airport. She's Mexican and Puerto Rican. Her father was from Vieques; her mother's family, a big one, filling the neighborhood's blocks. She learned early that when you want something, you figure it out.
“My parents bought me and my sister a Midge doll,” she said, “but we could only get one outfit. And I was like, but I want more clothes for my Midge.” Her mother told her she'd have to make them. So she put the doll on a piece of cloth, traced around her, found her mother's cookie tin of needles and thread, and started stitching. She was a child. Nobody taught her.
Her grandmother on her father's side was a seamstress in New York's garment district. She never passed anything down. Piotrowski doesn't fully understand how the skill arrived in her. “I don't know if it's nature," she said, "because I just started picking it up.”
She sketched obsessively. She sewed. She took two classes in perspective at a junior college. She eventually found her way. “I'm kind of jump-off, swim-like-heck," she said. "You don't want to drown, so you're just going to keep swimming."
[LEFT] Piotrowski walking through an early sketch. [RIGHT] Piotrowski talking through her process. | NaBeela Washington/15 West.
What she didn't do, for most of her adult life, was make art professionally. After high school, she went straight into insurance. She stayed for decades, raised three kids, bought a house, and kept her sketchbooks in the background. “It was mainly just the job to meet the ends … to put three kids through college," she said. “That's all it really was.”
Her son Paul Hernandez, 43, a marketing director, grew up watching her draw. “Her stuff was much more advanced than the stick figures you'd see from other parents,” he said. “I've always known my mom is talented. That's just been common knowledge.”
Over time, Hernandez realized he’d inherited more than just admiration.
“I've always found this natural connection to my mom,” he said. “We can look at something, we can make it, and we can draw it.”
Now he sees the same thing happening again. “My younger son is really trying to become an artist too.”
He's the one who posted her work on Reddit last year, after she created an Instagram account for her art. The response surprised them both.
What the Library Saw
The path to Humboldt Park started with a rejection.
Piotrowski applied to an open call at the Harold Washington Library for local artists. She wasn't selected. But the library told her something else: she was now listed in the Chicago Public Library's hanging files, a record of Chicago artists going back to the 1900s. They also told her that neighborhood branches sometimes host exhibits and workshops, and that she was welcome to reach out.
“I didn't care that they didn't choose me,” she said. “That was the prize. People are going to see my art.”
The entrance of the Humboldt Park Branch. | NaBeela Washington/15 West
She reached out to the Humboldt Park Branch herself.
It made sense: her father's family was Puerto Rican, and her cousins had lived in the neighborhood. “Everything that she does, whether it’s a quilt with Puerto Rico or Chicago, is really about who we are as people,” Hernandez said. “We’re Chicago, born and raised, and we love to share art back with the city.” Piotrowski brought in her work and sat down with branch manager Kristin LoDolce and Maria Maia, the adult librarian.
LoDolce said the decision was easy. “She sent us some images of her work, and we were delighted,” she said. “I have visited the island of Vieques myself, where two of her quilts are set, and I just thought her pieces really captured the warmth and joyful spirit of the island.”
Four quilts made the final display, chosen around what LoDolce described as the themes of homecoming, identity, and family ties. One of them, Wisdom and Youth, depicts Piotrowski's daughter as a child sitting with her great aunt in Vieques, palm trees and roosters in the background. Another shows Chicago's skyline from street level. The contrast, LoDolce said, resonated with a community that knows both worlds.
“Humboldt Park is the heart of the Puerto Rican community in Chicago,” LoDolce said. “Many of our residents share that experience of going back to the island, or of straddling those cultures.”
The response to the exhibit was immediate. “In the first weekend after it opened, we had folks coming in specifically to see it after hearing about it on social media,” LoDolce said. Interest in the workshop filled registration quickly. A second date may be added.
What Retirement Made Possible
Piotrowski now works out of a spare bedroom in her Oak Park condo, where she keeps three sewing machines and as many fabrics as she could salvage after downsizing from a larger home in Frankfort. She sketches first, takes photos when she can, then lets the fabric direct what comes next.
“I'll put them down on the fabric, trace them out, and figure out which fabrics give me the textures I want," she said. Some pieces are hand-sewn. Some go through the machine. The goal is always texture, the thing you can't get from a photograph.
[LEFT] Piotrowski holding her soldaderas quilt. [RIGHT] Piotrowski with her Art Institute quilt. | NaBeela Washington/15 West
She has already applied to exhibit at another Chicago library and is planning to reach out to the Beverly branch, which she recently learned sits near a quilt shop and arts district.
“Like I said, you jump in and you swim … and you just keep going,” she said.
After decades of watching his mother work, the picture comes into focus for Hernandez. “You're talking about a woman that worked in insurance, busted her ass for us, and did all this great work," he said. "And now she's actually able to showcase all of her art to the rest of the public. For us as a family, we're just super excited for her.”
Anita Piotrowski's quilts are on display at the Chicago Public Library's Humboldt Park Branch.
Her How to Make an Art Quilt workshop takes place March 21. Registration is full; additional dates may be added. Visit chipublib.org/events for updates.
