Learning Weaving Traditions of Western Norway: An Exhibit in Moorhead, Minnesota

Are you near Moorhead, Minnesota?  You will want to visit the upcoming exhibition, Craft and Identity – Summer School in Norway: Learning Weaving Traditions of Western Norway, at the Prairie Fiber Arts Center, opening this Friday, January 12, 2018.

Last summer from May 9^th through June 7^th, four students from Concordia College in Moorhead Minnesota went on a learning adventure. Alexis Anderson, Kristina Brunson, Rachel Johnson, and Alli Pahl, joined Heidi Goldberg (Associate Professor of Art at Concordia) and her daughter Aubrie (a freshman at Oak Grove Lutheran High School in Fargo) for a month in Norway. Based in art, craft, and the connection of making and identity, the group interwove art practice, art history, and exploration of places and cultures. Visiting sites and artists in Lillehammer, Gjovik, Oslo, Osterøy, and Bergen, the group focused a week at the Hordaland Museum on Osterøy learning warp-weighted weaving techniques from expert weavers Marta Kløve Juuhl and Monika Sunnanå Ravnanger. The works in this exhibition are samples woven during the course representing traditional åkler (bedspread) designs from Western Norway, and varafeldur (Viking cloak).

The Craft and Identity group (left to right); Aubrie Goldberg, Kristina Brunson, Rachel Johnson, Alli Pahl, Alexis Anderson, and Heidi Goldberg

The opening reception will be on Friday the 12^th of January, 4-5:30. The show will close on Friday February 16^th. Prairie Fiber Arts Center is located at 127 4th Street South, Moorhead, Minnesota.

Concordia students working on back-to-back warp-weighted looms at the Hordaland Museum in Osterøy, Norway

If you can’t make it to the exhibit, you can look forward to a lengthy description of the trip, with many photos, in the next issue of the Norwegian Textile Letter, coming in late February.