Description
Before it became the Nordic Heritage Museum in 1980, the red brick building was originally the Daniel Webster Elementary School from 1907 to 1979, when low student enrollment led to its closure. Fundraising and architecture plans are underway for a new building in downtown Ballard.
The museum's mission is to share "Nordic culture with people of all ages and backgrounds by exhibiting art and objects, preserving collections, providing educational and cultural experiences, and serving as a community gathering place." The founder and long-time director Marianne Forssblad retired in 2007. Erik Nelson followed her as executive director and Janet Rauscher became chief curator in 2008.
The museum publishes NHM Historical Journal on a quarterly basis. It also maintains a blog about restoring the Nordic Spirit, a boat in the museum's collection.
The Nordic Heritage Museum contains two libraries. The Walter Johnson Memorial Library was founded in 1980. As of 2011 it held 15500 books. It specializes in books published in Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish. Its special collection includes the Gordon Tracie Music Library and the Vanishing Generations Oral History Project. The Gordon Ekvall Tracie Music Library was founded in 1995. As of 2011 it contained 3000 audio/visual materials, 4000 music scores, 2500 books, and 40 periodical subscriptions. It focuses on folk customs, traditional dance, traditional music, folk art, and folk attire for Nordic cultures. Its special collections include the Gordon Ekvall Tracie History Collection, the Nordiska Folkdancers Collection, and the Skandia Folkdance Society Collection.
Read more about this topic: Nordic Heritage Museum
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Sage of Toronto ... spent several decades marveling at the numerous freedoms created by a “global village” instantly and effortlessly accessible to all. Villages, unlike towns, have always been ruled by conformism, isolation, petty surveillance, boredom and repetitive malicious gossip about the same families. Which is a precise enough description of the global spectacle’s present vulgarity.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)