clay county histories
Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC
The dust is starting to settle on the big reorganization of the Hjemkomst Center and we are ready to welcome visitors to our beautiful new exhibit gallery. Heritage Hall, our main exhibit hall since the building opened in 1986, will become the Fargo Moorhead Community Theater. We are thankful that the new museum walls and lighting system that we purchased for Heritage Hall at the beginning of the year are compatible with our new space in the 3rd Floor Gallery (which happens to be our old Clay County Historical Society gallery). And the first exhibit in our new-old gallery is one very close to our hearts: a collection of artist quilts about the world refugee crisis called Forced to Flee opening July 3.
We at the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County – both staff and members – have a great appreciation for the Fiber Arts. We regularly host exhibits that show that fabric in the hands of an artist can be taken to the level of Fine Art just as surely as oil paint or marble. And artists like to make art that matters. Refugees not only matter, they’re a local story. Our area has been a safe haven for refugees since Lutheran Social Services began resettling Polish, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian families after World War II.
These quilts are powerful. One includes children’s drawings of war-torn Syria. Another is a prayer made of fabric from real refugee life jackets. Another is a wife’s attempt to understand her husband’s childhood in Germany during WWII. Taken together, the 36 artists from around the world show you that this phenomenon of regular people being forced to flee their homes is a common human experience across continents, countries, and time.
The topic reminds me of an artist I came to call a friend named Saw Win Tun. Win is from Burma, a country that military dictators renamed Myanmar. In 1998, Win and other brave artists created an exhibition commemorating the 10th anniversary of a failed democratic uprising in Burma. Since art is powerful, the government jailed several of those artists and Saw Win Tun was forced to flee. He spent the next several years in a refugee camp teaching art to children on Thailand’s border with Burma.
In 2005, at an art gallery, he met Aryca, a Fargo girl working in Thailand. The two fell in love, got married, and made their home in the USA. In 2008, our museum held an exhibition of the watercolor paintings he made while living in the refugee camp. His beautiful artwork came to America rolled together in a mailing tube. Win gave one of the paintings to our museum as a gift, and it has hung in our office ever since. I lost track of Win in the years after he and Aryca moved to the Twin Cities, but his story is just one of many examples of how each refugee is a person with a unique story of facing tremendous adversity.