Craft Around the Country

Artists from the Upper Midwest Advance Scandinavian Traditions in a New Iowa Exhibition

Nordic Echoes: Tradition in Contemporary Art, a traveling exhibition organized by the American-Scandinavian Foundation, highlights artists who innovate within Swedish, Norwegian, and Finnish traditional arts.

By Jon Spayde
August 17, 2026

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Photo by E.G. Schempf

Installation view of Teresa Faris's work in Nordic Echoes, now on view at Vesterheim in Decorah, Iowa.

How do you keep Scandinavian craft traditions alive in America?

Nordic Echoes: Tradition in Contemporary Art, a traveling exhibition now on view at Decorah, Iowa’s Vesterheim National Norwegian-American Museum and Folk Art School, offers a compelling answer: by innovating within them.

Open until the end of the year, the show brings together more than 50 works by 24 artists working in the Upper Midwest. All of the pieces on display belong to venerable traditions of making in Norway, Sweden, or Finland—and all of them offer fresh and often unexpected twists on those traditions, born of the artist’s imagination, personal life, or historical circumstances.

Take, for example, the work of Bill Amundson of Stoughton, Wisconsin, who practices rosemaling, a decorative art characterized by colorful, flowing scrollwork and fantasy flower motifs. The rosemaling on Amundson’s plates looks traditional—until you get up close and realize that he painted his own version of the flowerlike Covid-19 molecule and added Norwegian words, in florid script, that order the virus to go away.

Photo by E.G. Schempf

Teresa Faris, CWaB: Place #8, sterling silver, Thulite, wood altered by a bird, 1.5 x 1.5 x 0.75 in.

Or Teresa Faris’s wood altered by a bird. The Madison, Wisconsin–based jeweler interprets the shapes of traditional Sámi jewelry in her own way, in one example adding little bits of wood pecked away from a bird toy by her pet bird when Faris was ill and the bird, highly attuned to her, seemed worried.

Lisa Wiitala’s Finnish wool pile rugs are decorated with motifs based on berries that grow in her native Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, not in Finland, and Minnesota-based Dakota artist Talon Cavender-Wilson fuses Indigenous design and artwork with blacksmithing traditions he learned in Sweden.

“I’m enthusiastic about this exhibition because one thing I especially enjoy in craft and art is when the roots are clear, but the contemporary expression is also clear,” says Laurann Gilbertson, chief curator at Vesterheim. “I want people to come away from the exhibition with the sense that these are living traditions.”

Photo by Teresa Faris

Granite Falls, Minnesota–based blacksmith Talon Cavender-Wilson combines Dakota motifs and Swedish smithing techniques in his work.

Improbably, this showcase of Midwestern artists was conceived in New York. The American-Scandinavian Foundation, located in Scandinavia House on Park Avenue in Manhattan, supports Scandinavian traditions in the arts and other fields via grant programs, including one called Nordic Folk Arts & Cultural Traditions in the Upper Midwest. The foundation defines that region as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, the Dakotas, and part of Michigan—the very Finnish-American Upper Peninsula.

Sally Yerkovich, director of educational exchange and special projects at the foundation, oversees the grants—and curated the show, which she initially saw as a way to expose some of her Upper Midwestern grantees to a wider audience. “But then,” she says, “I realized I also wanted to include other artists working in these traditions—most of whom are not well-known even in their states.”

After a well-received debut at Scandinavia House, the exhibition set out on a journey to venues in each of the Upper Midwest states that comprise the foundation’s definition of the Upper Midwest: before Vesterheim, it appeared at the South Dakota Art Museum in Brookings and the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis. In 2027, it will move on to the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota; the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin; and then the DeVos Art Museum in Marquette, Michigan.

Photo by E.G. Schempf

Lisa Wiitala, Thimbleberry Berry, wool yarn, 7.25 x 8 x 1.75 in. Wiitala, a fourth-generation Finnish American living in Hancock, Michigan, weaves ryijy and rag rugs as part of her ongoing exploration of her Nordic heritage.

Photo by E.G. Schempf

Three of Bill Amundson's Covid Plates bear messages telling the virus to stay away and are meant to be hung in the home to ward off illness, 12 x 12 x 1 in.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.

Learn more about Nordic Echoes online.

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