Doris Sikorsky can remember being embarrassed about her Polish-speaking grandmother as a kid. “We lived near Devon and Milwaukee,” she says. “My parents, first-generation Americans, had moved out here early, and it was far from the ethnic neighborhoods. So most of my friends were non-Poles.” Still, the old-world traditions were alive in her home and at the parochial grade school she attended, where Polish nuns taught her the rudiments of the peasant art of paper cutting.
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Sikorsky was smitten with color but wasn’t interested in folk art. She went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied painting, going into the galleries to learn from the masters by copying their work. When she graduated, she says, “I was greatly surprised that I wasn’t prepared to earn a living.” She took a job as a graphic artist and wound up as a buyer and advertising manager for a department store. It wasn’t until her grandparents died, in the mid-70s, that she started to feel the pull of the art that was her heritage. She joined the Polish Arts Club of Chicago and began to study Polish paper cutting, or wycinanki (pronounced “vicheenonkey”), with the group’s elders.
Sikorsky is concerned about passing this art along and teaches it whenever she can. She and a sister are the only surviving members of their family, but when their parents died six years ago a child came into her life. Meggie Sorensen, whose mother sang at Sikorsky’s parents’ funerals (and who is one-quarter Polish), told Sikorsky she had been cutting paper since she was old enough to hold scissors. Sorensen, now 14, became Sikorsky’s apprentice. They’ve won two grants from the Ethnic and Folk Arts Master/Apprentice Program of the Illinois Arts Council (Sorensen is the youngest recipient ever, Sikorsky says), and are working together to make wycinanki as meaningful now as it was when it first decorated the whitewashed homes of rural Poland. Sikorsky pulls out a recent kodra by Sorensen–an oblong, storytelling piece in the multicolored style of the Lowicz region. It shows the artist and three of her friends enjoying that time-honored custom of American girlhood, the sleepover.
