It’s December, a good time to think about rich experiences of the past year and to get rid of piles of paper. One page of scrawled notes has been sent to the bottom of the pile, or put in another pile, since April. I would look at the that page and think – really, I have to get that bearskin muff photo. Finally, I did.
Ulla-Karin Warberg, Curator at the Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, sent it to me. She held a lecture on Scandinavian folk art at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in April. I only heard the first of her two talks, a wonderful lecture about how furniture design varied in several regions of Sweden, influenced by the resources, economy and geography of the areas.
Ulla-Karin showed this photo of a decked-out farm couple from Jämtland (one of six million photos in the Nordiska Museum collection). Their names are not known, but she used the photo to show how people were photographed to show their material wealth. A bear fur and wolverine hat! Gloves were important. It looks like they are wearing fancy silk scarves. The woman holds a book. On large Swedish farms textiles were considered capital, indicators of wealth. They weren’t sold, but passed to future generations. The wife displays significant textile bling draped over her arm.
Afterwards we had dinner with Ulla-Karin at Va Bene (recommended!). She revealed that while she spends much time outside of Sweden, this was her first visit to the U.S.–to Duluth for a week in April! She stayed in a lovely hotel with a large window facing the lake and she was enthusiastic both about the snowstorm raging outside one day and the sharp beautiful blue vista over the lake on a sunny day. She was able to enjoy dramatic Minnesota weather.
If I had written this post up right after Ulla-Karin’s talk, as I intended, I could have related more interesting points from her lecture. As it is, several months later, I can only wonder why I wrote down “smallpox vaccinations…”