Laura Foster Nicholson: Foretelling the Future, Reflecting the Past

September 26 – November 13, 2024 Opening Reception: Thursday, September 26 7:00-8:30 p.m.

The Finlandia Art Gallery will present Foretelling the Future, Reflecting the Past, a textile exhibit by Laura Foster Nicholson. 

The exhibit will be held at The Finlandia Gallery, located in the Finnish American Heritage Center (FAHC), Hancock from September 26 to November 13, 2024. 

A reception for the artist will take place at the gallery, Thursday, September 26, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m.  The reception is free and open to the public, refreshments will be served.

“Climate change is not the future, it is now,” says Laura Foster Nicholson in describing her work.  An award winning textile artist, Foster Nicholson uses her weavings to convey her deep concern for the environment and the effects of climate change.  In her Finlandia Art Gallery exhibition “Foretelling the Future, Reflecting the Past” Foster Nicholson will present two of her series: Venice and Containers. 

Her Venice series strives to convey the future of damage, dislocation and loss faced by all of us living near large bodies of water as a result of rising sea levels.  “The poignance of seeing such a treasure of an artwork, the City of Venice, annually inundated with devastating flooding, is a dramatic beacon, highlighting the plight faced by cities around the world.”

In her Containers series, she visually distills our societies ever increasing appetite for consumer goods and the vast network of shipping and trucking routes needed to meet that appetite. “The manufacture of the goods, the energy expended, the end use of goods no longer desired, all deeply affect our environment and our health.”

Foster Nicholson is of Scottish and English heritage and had strong support from her family to study art. Her education led her first to Kansas City Art Institute where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts, but it was her graduate education at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield, Michigan that made her a life-long friend of Finland.

“I went on to get my MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art which was highly recommended by my professor. Cranbrook is a very small but intensively aesthetic school, dedicated to the hand, critical thought and vision, and the goals of the arts and crafts movement, a handmade environment,” says Foster Nicholson.

“Eliel & Loja Saarinen, a Finnish Architect and his textile designer wife, designed much of the original Cranbrook community, with buildings detailed down to the laying of each brick, bringing in sculptors and metalsmiths and weavers to embellish and bring to life this extraordinary Finnish American environment. Their aesthetic has lived on for decades at Cranbrook, and I became a devotee.”

“So now, I am part Finnish, by adoption,” continues Foster Nicholson. “I was, and still am, mesmerized by the totally designed environment, engaging art and craft and design in equal portions. When I was a student there, I had a work-study job at the Cranbrook Museum, helping to prepare Loja Saarinen’s rugs and textiles for a large exhibition about Cranbrook (Design in America: the Cranbrook Vision, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). And now, I live in New Harmony, Indiana, a Utopian settlement full of art, artists, visionaries, and life.”

Foster Nicholson’s artwork is in a number of museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the archives of the Venice Biennale, Racine Art Museum, Reading Public Museum, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Cotsent Collection of the Textile Museum, Washington, DC, as well as many private and corporate collections.

Foretelling the Future, Reflecting the Past will be on display at The Finlandia Gallery through November 13, 2024.
The Finlandia Art Gallery is located in the Finnish American Heritage Center, 435 Quincy Street, Hancock. Gallery hours are Monday-Friday, 8:30 am – 4:30 pm. Please call 906-487-7309 or email gallery@finlandiafoundation.org for more information.