Northfield, Minnesota 55057

An exhibition of Finnish woodcut prints titled ?Mirror of the Wood: A Century of the Woodcut Print in Finland? will open at the Carleton College Art Gallery on Friday, April 8. Karen Kunc, one of the exhibit?s curators and the Willa Cather Professor of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, will give a lecture titled ?Woodcut as Mirror of Place? at 7:30 p.m. that evening in Carleton College?s Boliou Hall, Room 104. The lecture will be followed by a reception at 8:30 p.m. in the Carleton Art Gallery. The reception will feature traditional Finnish folk music by the Finn Hall Trio from the Twin Cities. Both events are free and open to the public.

The exhibition features 70 woodcut prints, dating from 1896 to present, from 39 Finnish artists. The prints, which embed the spirit of nature in wood grain, are a powerful medium in the hands of these artists from a country whose abundant forests have supported life for centuries. Printmakers take advantage of the qualities of the wood and their strong design sense to create prints representing their love of nature and historical connection with the material. The theme of ?Mirror of the Wood? considers the evocative aura of Finland as a place of pristine forests and lakes, and the subjects of the prints are organized around four themes: the Finnish creation myth Kalevala, reflections on social life, nature and wood as material and content.

Kunc received her B.F.A. from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and her M.F.A. from Ohio State University. She joined the faculty at Nebraska in 1983 and became a graduate faculty fellow in 1991. She has lectured and presented workshops in more than 100 institutions in the U.S. and abroad, including the Krakow Academy of Fine Art, the Icelandic College of Art and Craft, the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy of Fine Art in Dhaka, India, and the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. She was the 1989 Dayton Hudson Distinguished Visiting Artist/Teacher at Carleton, and was a 1996 Fulbright Scholar to Finland.

The exhibition?s co-curator is Jukka Partanen, head curator of the Jyväskylä Art Museum Center for Printmaking in Finland. Before arriving at Carleton, the exhibition will have been on display at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle. The exhibition will run through May 8.

The Carleton College Art Gallery is open daily at noon and closes at 6 p.m. Monday-Wednesday, 10 p.m. Thursday-Friday, and 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. The Art Gallery has limited disability accessibility. For more information or disability accommodations, call Wendy Nordquist at (507) 646-5870 or visit the Art Gallery website at http://webapps.acs.carleton.edu/campus/gallery/

Added by carlmedr on March 28, 2005

Interested 1