A major collector of Scandinavian objects who lived in a Southern Minnesota town died recently, and Suzanne Kramer, an antique dealer specializing in Scandinavian antiques (Country Gallery Antiques, River Falls, Wisconsin), is selling items from her estate. I was pretty astounded to see how many weavings she had by Lila Nelson, and how many of them I had never seen. Lila was my friend and mentor. She died at 93 in 2015. All her weaving friends were aware of how prolific she was — this new trove is evidence of that! Many of the tapestries are not signed, but carry her unmistakable stamp of creativity and in many cases, whimsy.
My blog readers will fall into two camps. One set of friends will exclaim to themselves, “What?! A whole set of Lila Nelson’s tapestries have surfaced and come up for sale?” Other readers won’t know about Lila’s importance to me as a mentor and to a wide group of weavers as a teacher and source of inspiration, and her importance as a weaver. If you would like to see many images of her work, you can view a webinar I presented for Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in 2020, “How Lila Nelson’s Tapestries Embraced the World and Its Politics.” Or you can see many photos in this list of works from the Textile Center exhibit after her death in 2015, “The Tapestries of Lila Nelson: Poetry, Myth and Protest.”
Many of her tapestries featured cats: humorous cats, sweet cats, and terrorist cats. (See: “Oh Lila You Wove so many Cat Tapestries.”) Among the weavings in the gallery below, note the number of cats!
The estate includes many other weavings. Some of these might have been woven by Lila, as she wove in traditional Norwegian techniques for decades.
I think you would all agree that this is a textile treasure trove. It may be worth a trip to the Nordic Fest in Decorah, Iowa, this weekend to see them all. Suzanne Kramer will be featuring Scandinavian textiles and jewelry. If you see something you would like to purchase, or need more information about a specific piece, please contact Kramer at suzannekramer@msn.com.