The idea for “Mygration,” an installation by Swedish artist Stina Folkebrant and Sámi artist Tomas Colbengtson, began as a dream.
“I have this dream, and I see the whole exhibition in my dream— with my paintings and Tomas’ art,” Folkebrant explained at a panel discussion last Saturday at the American Swedish Institute. “I woke up Saturday morning, I just made a sketch. And I called Thomas. We met, and we decided to make this exhibition.”
Folkebrant grew up in the Southern part of Sweden. Brought up in a Communist household, she didn’t have religion growing up, and would often escape into the forest where she found connection and meaning. “The older I got, I went deeper and deeper into the forest and to the creek and the river and so on,” she said. “Slowly it became my church. So I kind of created my own connection with the spirit of nature, and that has been healing for me as a person as an individual growing up without any religion or belonging.”
In her work, Folkebrant often paints animals moving through natural environments, using a grayscale palette and watery acrylic paint.
Colbengtson, meanwhile, grew up in a Sámi community in the Arctic circle of Sweden. Much like practices in the United States, the Swedish government had boarding schools and other policies designed to take language and culture away from Sámi people. The church, also, was a part of this cultural violence, he told me.
“The church has been really suppressing,” he said in an interview. “They were like the hit men of the politicians. They even dug up human remains, and sold them. We were forbidden to speak Sámi language in school up to the late 1960s.”
Even after that time, Folkebrant said in our conversation, a guilt remained for wearing Sámi clothes, and singing cultural songs. “It’s kind of a shame,” he said. “It’s kind of hard to turn it off.”
In his career as an artist, Colbengtson has engaged in re-learning cultural heritage. That’s even through a kind of silence he’s perceived around the traumatic experiences of Sámi people.
“We don’t talk about things like the boarding school experience or how suicide has affected our community, or things like that,” he said at the artist talk. “So, in a way, the urge to make an art is kind of a conversation to your father and mother. It’s also a connection to your elders and grandmothers. But in pain, there is also joy.”
The installation Colbengtson and Folkebrant created together features eight of Folkebrant’s large scale paintings of reindeer, an animal tied culturally to the Sámi people in Northern Scandinavia and Russia. Each of the eight gray-scaled paintings represent a different season, including pre-summer, summer, pre-autumn, autumn, pre-winter, winter, pre-spring, and spring. Interacting with these paintings are archival photographs of Sámi who immigrated to Alaska in 1894 and 1898, which are transformed into primary colored monochrome screen-prints on polycarbonate glass, which also act as mirrors.
Before her dream about the show, Folkebrant had watched a documentary about the migration journey of the Sámi herders who were paid by the U.S. government to travel to Alaska in order to train tribal groups on how to herd reindeer. In two separate journeys, the Sámi traveled by ship with their herds to the East coast of the United States, took a train to San Francisco, and then a boat for the rest of the journey. The journey was fraught, and many Sámi dispersed to join the Yukon Gold rush or moved to other parts of North America. By 1937, they were banned from owning reindeer throughout Alaska.
Folkebrant and Colbengtson’s installation— which you can view in part at the American Swedish Institute and in part at All My Relations Arts, brings that history into three dimensions. The immersive work makes you feel as if you are surrounded by reindeer, with the presence of the Sámi in the room with you. At AMRA, the installation can be seen as part of “Okizi (To Heal).” The companion traveling exhibition at ASI, “Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People,” is co-curated by Colbengtson along with Gunvor Guttorm, Dan Jåma and Britta Marakatt-Labba, and featuring 12 Indigenous artists from Sápmi and North America.
Besides his collaboration with Folkebrant, Colbengtson shows a number of his other individual works at both ASI and AMRA. One is a giant Saemie drum called “Children of the Sun,” covered with gold leaf, and screen printed with archival photographs of Sámi people. The ASI exhibition also features two of Colbengtson’s oil paintings on aluminum. One references the boarding school experience and the other investigates notions of identity. Employing archival imagery, Colbengtson takes a textured approach to the work, evoking stark emotion and trauma in the works.
Further work shown at AMRA by Colbengtson explores boarding schools, and there’s also a glass drum adorned with red reindeer and herders. The red in some of the reindeer seems to run out— so they look either as if they are emaciated, and/or disappearing.
Meanwhile, each of the two exhibitions at the two institutions features artists from Indigenous cultures across continents. The work ranges from pieces that highlight Indigenous artistry and craft— like a gorgeous arctic fox fur with floral beadwork by Teresa McDowell at All My Relations, to work that addresses Indigenous histories, storytelling and contemporary issues.
Often, artists grapple with their own relationship to animals and nature— like St. Olaf assistant professor Courtney M. Leonard’s “BREACH: Scrimshaw Studies,” (2014), on view at AMRA. That clay sculpture evokes the image of a whale tooth, inspired by Leonard’s experience of encountering a beached whale on the coast of New York state. The Shinnecock artist addresses her community’s kinship with nature and whales in particular, as she grapples with ways in which Native groups aren’t given access to conversations around water issues and the environment.
“When I think of ‘Breach,’ I think of it as this learning journey,” she said at the panel talk. “Who gets to say what other nations get to have access to, and who gets to tell us how we should sustain ourselves and how we should remain resilient?”
Other work spoke to connections with artists’ ancestors and families. Another Minnesota-based artist, Karen Goulet, who is the Miikanan Gallery program director at the Watermark Art Center in Bemidji, created a series of bags that honored her ancestors and particularly her grandmother— both through the craftwork itself and a cyanotype image. “It’s her story,” Goulet told me. “The image is of her when she was young, maybe around the time she met my grandpa. It’s my honoring her and how significant and important she was to us.”
The connections between the different Indigenous cultures represented in the two exhibitions illustrate similarities in artistic practices, connection to nature and animals, and in historical suppression. The two shows illuminate hidden histories while also celebrating a terrific group of artists working in contemporary practices buoyed by cultural knowledge and exploration.
“Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People,” is on view through May 26 at the American Swedish Institute ($13). More information here. “Okizi (To Heal)” is on view at All My Relations Gallery through April 13 (free). More information here.
Sheila Regan
Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at [email protected].