| “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. |
