July 24 – 28, 2024

Many berries and vegetables contain pigments called anthocyanins. You’ll get to paint and explore how acidic and alkaline substances found in food cupboards affect colors. Are you ready to be surprised?

In this workshop, you’ll learn about the connection between mathematics and art, and how origamis are used for in the field of technology. You can fold origamis and make geometric shapes out of them. Did you know that origami methods are used in space technology?

University of Helsinki and Aalto University will be hosting a networking event for alumni and friends of the universities.

The University of Helsinki together with Aalto University, cordially invites alumni and friends to join us for a networking event on Friday, July 26th at FinnFest 2024 from 5:30-7:30 PM in Duluth, MN. As our first time attending FinnFest, we are excited to be able to meet with local (and regional) University of Helsinki alumni that now call the US Midwest home.

Join us for this first of its kind get together. We are excited to meet you, share some light snacks and drinks, and have good conversation. We’re excited to see what you have been up to and how you’ve made this corner of the USA a little bit more Finnish as your new home.

You are also welcome to sign up a companion / +1 to this event. Please register by July 22 so that we can plan accordingly. Looking forward to seeing you!

Register here: https://www.lyyti.fi/reg/USA_Alumni_at_FinnFest2024)

Interviews with six traditional craft artists on the Edmund Fitzgerald Stage, each of whom has a booth in the Tori Nordic Fair where they display their work and talk with tori visitors. These interviews create opportunities to listen to folklorists as they interview each traditional artist.

The artists’ participation at the 2024 festival is partially funded by either the American Scandinavian Foundation or sponsored and organized by the Nordic Folklife Project/Center for the Study of Upper Midwest Cultures, University of Wisconsin–Madison.

10 am – Derek Brabender with interview by Jason Schroeder
11 am – Wayne Valliere with interview by Tom DuBois
12 pm – Reading of Akanidi Story (10min) by Laurel Sanders from Sami Center
1 pm – Alan Anderson with Marcus Cederstrom interviewer
2 pm – Taylor Johnson with Marcus Cederstrom interviewer
3 pm – Lori and Kara Oikarainen with Yvonne Lockwood, interviewer

Finnish utopian communities have an interesting history reaching back to the 1792 “New Jerusalem” plan in Sierra Leone. While the best-known Finnish utopian ventures are Sointula in Canada (1901-1905) and Colonia Finlandesa (1906-1940) in Argentina there were, however, almost twenty similar Finnish ventures around the world based on nationalism, utopian socialism, cooperative movements, “tropic fevers,” and religious ideas. This exhibit includes photographs, texts and maps.

Presenter Bio: Mr. Teuvo Peltoniemi, Licentiate of Social Sciences, is a Finnish researcher and science journalist specializing in Nordic migration. He has worked in universities, radio, TV, and print media, and published 18 books. In 2007, he was honored with the “State of Finland Award for Life Work on Public Information.”

This exhibit honors Minnesotans, past and present, who consider themselves Finnish American. This exhibit is presented in eleven topics presented through photos and text. The topical selections, and the people documented here, are not meant to represent the complete experience of Finnish Americans and those who identify as such. We encourage you to think about this as you explore the sources presented here. What other topics might we also have included? What questions do these sources raise for you? You may know the complex history of the land now known as Finland; what do those complications mean for the historical record of Americans of Finnish identity? We invite you to think about these questions as you experience this exhibit.

Presenter Bio: The Immigration History Research Center Archives at the University of Minnesota maintains a large and significant collection of Finnish American materials, one of the two major collections in the USA, the other at the Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock, Michigan.