Fifty-Four Works, Twenty-Four Artists, and a Quiet Argument About What Folk Art Is

There is a version of Nordic folk art that lives permanently in the past tense. It is the version in which rosemaling was something your great-grandmother's neighbour did, weaving is a technique recovered from a museum catalogue, and the job of a heritage institution is to keep the objects safe from the present.

An exhibition running at Vesterheim in Decorah, Iowa until 31 December sets out to argue the opposite.

“Nordic Echoes: Tradition in Contemporary Art,” organised by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, is a travelling show of contemporary Nordic folk arts and cultural traditions from the Upper Midwest — North and South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It brings together 54 works by 24 living artists: paper cutting, rosemaling, weaving, sculpture, ceramics, and decorated sheepskin coverings known as skinnfell.

The framing is the point. The exhibition presents these works as living, malleable forms grounded in traditional skills — rather than as static objects rooted in an imagined past.

Testing the boundaries

Vesterheim's chief curator, Laurann Gilbertson, put the case for the show in terms that acknowledge it is not entirely comfortable:

It's wonderful to have these artworks, some of which test the boundaries of Scandinavian folk art, at Vesterheim.

That phrase — test the boundaries — is doing real work. A folk art tradition that cannot be tested is not a tradition; it is a style guide. The interesting question a show like this raises is where a curator draws the line between a practice that has evolved and a practice that has simply been borrowed.

It is a question Vesterheim is unusually well placed to host. The museum traces its collecting to 1877 and holds in the region of 33,000 artefacts — the largest Norwegian-American collection in the country. It is also not only a museum: the Folk Art School attached to it teaches the same techniques as working skills, to anyone who signs up.

The artists are also the teachers

The detail that ties the exhibition to the institution is that several of the artists in it teach there.

Pieper Bloomquist and Turi Austin, both presenting online webinars on decorative painting, are Folk Art School instructors — as are KJ Groven, Jerry Johnson, Lucy and Gene Tokheim, Karen Rebholz, Beth Homa Kraus and Elizabeth Belz, among others.

The plate at the top of this page is Johnson's. It is worth holding the two images in this piece side by side: a rosemaled green man, painted in a technique with a documented lineage, and a brooch made in collaboration with a bird. Both are in the same exhibition, under the same heading.

That overlap is worth noticing. In most museum contexts, the people in the vitrine and the people running the workshop are different populations separated by a century. Here they are the same people, on the same site, in the same year. Whatever else it is, that is a working definition of a tradition that has not stopped.

What else is coming

Programming continues around the exhibition. Sally Yerkovich of the American-Scandinavian Foundation will give a gallery talk, joined by several of the artists, during Vesterheim's Norwegian Christmas programming. Further online and onsite events are being announced as the run continues.

The exhibition closes on 31 December. Details, opening hours and the current programme are on Vesterheim's own exhibition page.

This piece was prepared from material submitted to The Northern Voices by Vesterheim. The exhibition dates, the count of works and artists, and the quotation from the chief curator are as supplied by the museum; readers planning a visit should confirm current hours directly with Vesterheim. The two artwork images were supplied by Vesterheim with the submission and are reproduced here by permission of the museum; no photographer credit was provided with them, and the artist attributions follow the museum's own file names. Cover image: Jerry Johnson, Greenman (2024). Exterior photograph from Wikimedia Commons as credited.