The Brooklyn Rail

This elegantly designed exhibition features contemporary artists and craftspeople of the Upper Midwest states, a region encompassing North and South Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the largest populations of Scandinavian descent in the United States live. The accompanying literature specifies that its focus is on those “whose practices are informed by Nordic traditional skills.” A wide variety of mediums is represented, including painting, textiles, carved wood, and blacksmithed metal as well as hybridized forms that “explore themes of identity and belonging” and traditions “passed down and changed … often shaped by the Upper Midwestern environment and landscape by using local materials.”

The exhibition is organized by Sally Yerkovich, a cultural anthropologist with a museum background who spent years traveling the region preparing the show, which will travel to museums in all of the abovementioned states. She relied on local and state arts councils to seek out practitioners, and in every case, she was interested not just in artists that preserved Nordic craft traditions, but those involved in their extension and adaptation.

For example, several artists included in the exhibition incorporate the Norwegian decorative painting technique known as rosemaling, a stylized patterning that incorporates floral, geometric, and scrollwork motifs. This technique dates from the eighteenth century and was used to decorate wooden surfaces of all kinds, from bowls and hearths to horse-drawn wagons. Here it is combined with an obscurely mythological, humorous portrait, Green Man (2024), on a circular tablet by Jerry Johnson of Wisconsin, a stoneware Fjord Horse Platter (n.d.) with horse head–shaped handles and an encircling paisley-like centerpiece by Gene and Lucy Tokheim, which is part of the Rosemaled collection of Tokheim Stoneware from southern Minnesota, and several examples of the Dala Horse (n.d.), by Tara Austin, where hand-painted patterns are suspended in hard, horse-shaped transparent acrylic that refers to the traditional wooden Dala horse, a mainstay of Swedish culture and heritage.

Nearby, woodsman Peter “Pekka” Olson makes use of Finnish woodcarving traditions in several hanging pieces, Sunburst, Midnight Sun (of course), and Starburst no. 2 (all n.d.), designs so sophisticated that one can easily imagine gilt versions of them in an apartment by Jean-Michel Frank. In their present state, they would be very much at home in the Eames House. A wooden Dough Bowl (2024) by Jess Hirsch, turned from poplar and stained black with egg tempera paint, similarly combines rustic and modernist styles, as does a sinuous Contemporary Goose (2024) bowl by Mike Loeffler, its well a deep black and its exterior left natural in carved quaking aspen (a relatively short-lived tree that thrives in the northern climate). These works are both low and refined elongated forms, familiar to any general experience of Scandinavian design, but with more expressive power than much of that we might come across in the commercial realm.

Nate White’s basswood Snibskål altar (n.d.), stained deep black with milk paint—a non-toxic substance that comes powdered and can be mixed with water to various densities—is an arch-shaped relief containing a cubic patterning that holds a wooden bowl cantilevered slightly above its mid-point. It’s a beautiful object that might also serve as a font of holy water. Snibskål is the name of a traditional kind of eared bowl—White also contributes two of these to the show.

The most compelling object on view is Amber M. Jensen’s A Raft to Float Along Patterns of the Sea (2024), made from woven wool, hemp yarn, and smoked reed. Its unusually subtle tonalities maintain a quiet presence: a woven mat has been upturned and attached at the top, bottom, and sides to form a flat-boat fantasy object. Although the interweaving of long reeds is a common weaving practice, the title might allude to the Old Testament: baby Moses set afloat on a reed basket (though the work is big enough to hold a grown person), or perhaps Moses again, now an adult, leading the Israelites across the “sea of reeds.”

Two artists represented here have Indigenous heritage. Tia Keobounpheng’s family background is Finnish and Sámi—an Indigenous people of Sápmi, a region encompassing parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Kola Peninsula. Her two weavings on board combine colored pencil and thread and, in a film projected on the gallery walls, she traverses the rich, isolated landscape of the Sápmi region wearing traditional Sámi dress. The film is accompanied by a haunting sung and hummed melody that she wrote and recorded for the soundtrack.

Talon Cavender-Wilson studied blacksmithing in Sweden and is of Dakota heritage, of the Upper Sioux community in Minnesota. His cross-ribbed metal rods, titled Wa*ter (n.d.) curve over one another as they intersect in a kind of pictograph of a flowing liquid matrix. This piece and most of the other works I have described recall craft culture’s critical relationship to fine arts culture in the former’s devotion to known forms and structures of use. The rhythms of originality and tradition are both in play, but you always know what the rules are. This is not just pleasant and reassuring, but just as valuable as avant-garde experimentation, like reading sonnets or haiku after too much free verse.