North House Folk School

Resident Artisans Laura Brown and Nate White are back from their trips to Scandinavia and are now wrapping up their final weeks in the Artisan Development Program. To celebrate their last two years in ADP, we're hosting a final show to highlight their amazing work from their time as Resident Artisans. 

Show Hours:
June 24-July 1, 9am-4pm each day

Opening Reception:
Friday, June 23, 5-7pm

Resident Artisans:

Laura Brown is an artist interested in color, process, imagination, and repetitive, labor-intensive tasks. She grew up in the rural high desert of southwestern Colorado and the northwoods of Wisconsin, and hails from a maternal lineage of professional and home sewists. As a child, she learned to sew, cook, and decorate cakes in her local 4-H club, and wrote stories and kept copious scrapbooks in her spare time. These interests led her to pursue a formal studio art education, where the discovery of printmaking and book arts as disciplines made perfect sense for her love of both language and image. She continued to sew, and found delight in creating quilts, which she thinks of as collages made from fabric. These days, her work includes printmaking, installation, book arts, and textiles. At North House, she continues to expand her quilting knowledge and practice, including the use of natural dyes from local foraged plants.

Laura holds an MFA in Studio Art from University of Texas at Austin. She has participated in residencies at the Myren Graffikk in Kristiansand, Norway; the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California; Minnesota Center for Book Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York. Her work appears in collections at Yale University and the Library of Congress, among others.
 

Nathan White was born in Milwaukee, WI, and moved to Minneapolis in 2009. Through his interest in sculpture, he started carving spoons; which in turn, inspired him to pursue woodworking. His first stop of that pursuit was apprenticing at the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in Pemaquid, ME. While there, Nate lived in community with his instructors and other apprentices as they learned boat building fundamentals building and restoring skiffs, peapods, dinghies, and other smaller boats and vessels. After his apprenticeship, he stayed in Maine and worked with one of his former instructors building a house and living off grid. During his time in Maine, he was introduced to many aspects of craft such as green woodworking, and is where he first learned to turn bowls on a lathe. Following that, he went back and forth between Minnesota to work at a wooden boat restoration shop, and Maine to work as a timber framer. In 2016 he was a recipient of the Folk and Traditional Art Grant from the Minnesota States Arts Board to study traditional wooden bowls of Scandinavia. Nate received an Artist Initiative Grant also from the MSAB in 2019, and in the spring of 2021, did his first residency at Anderson Ranch in Snowmass Village, CO.

With his time in the Artisan Development Program, Nate is looking forward to his first opportunities to teach, learn to cross country ski, and to build on the skills he already has while learning new ones along the way.