Nordic Heritage Museum
Seattle
Today’s visitors to Seattle may know the Ballard neighborhood as a popular hipster spot with eclectic shops and great local restaurants. But Jan Colbreze, deputy director of external affairs at the Nordic Heritage Museum, sees a rich history in the area.
“This is a historically Nordic neighborhood,” she said. “It’s a working waterfront with lots of Norwegian fishermen and Swedish loggers.”
Along with immigrants from Denmark, Iceland and Finland, the local Norwegians and Swedes make up the 12 percent of people in the state of Washington that come from Nordic ancestry. The Nordic Heritage Museum exists to tell their stories.
“Our core exhibition here focuses on the Nordic immigration to this country between the 1880s and 1920s,” Colbreze said. “We have galleries dedicated to folk art of those countries and the occupations of early immigrants. We also have a visiting gallery that we use to showcase contemporary art and culture from the five Nordic countries.”
The museum’s galleries showcase artifacts from a collection of more than 70,000 items, some that came from Nordic countries and others that represent typical lifestyles of Nordic immigrants living in the United States.
In addition to its permanent and temporary exhibits, the museum hosts a number of special events. Every two years, it holds a Nordic quilting conference that, according to Colbreze, features the “rock stars of the quilting world.” An annual Nordic film festival features movies filmed in all five of the Nordic countries.
This summer, the museum will break ground on a facility in Ballard that will serve as its new home beginning in January 2018.
Mexican Museum
San Francisco
Visual art is an incredibly important part of Mexican culture, but in the 1970s, artists of Mexican descent in the United States weren’t finding many opportunities to showcase their work. So Peter Rodriguez, a Chicano artist living in San Francisco, founded the Mexican Museum to showcase the artwork created by him and his friends.
“The Mexican Museum was one of the first ethnic-based museums to pop up,” said Adriana Lopez, the museum’s interim director. “It was founded around the idea of showing Mexican art. Peter Rodriguez was a collector, so he started with his collection and the work of his friends.”
Now, more than 30 years after its founding, the collection has grown to include some 17,000 works of art, all related to Mexico in one way or another. This includes numerous pieces of pre-Colombian art created by the indigenous people of Mexico, as well as works from the colonial era in Mexico and modern art created by Mexican Americans.
Currently, the artwork is showcased through a series of temporary exhibits — each compiled from the museum collection — organized around different themes. But the museum is also in the process of building a new location in San Francisco’s Mission district, set to open in early 2019, that will feature permanent exhibits in addition to rotating galleries.
Groups that visit the Mexican Museum can have a variety of enriching experiences.
“We really like to use visual thinking strategies and allow visitors to interpret artwork themselves,” Lopez said. “So we learn a little bit about how to analyze artwork. Then we go into a classroom space and have a hands-on workshop where they can create an expressionist mural based on music. We also have an experience where visitors put on Spanish explorer hats and go through the museum to find things they have never seen before. They have clipboards and create their own travel logs.”
