​The New Map and Women Pioneers at Nationalmuseum Design

December 4 sees the opening of two exhibitions at Nationalmuseum Design. The New Map describes how collaboration between designers and manufacturers in a region of southern Sweden is highlighting the scope for local partnerships in an era when many believe Swedish manufacturing is dead. Women Pioneers presents works from the interwar years by accomplished female artists and designers whom history has more or less forgotten.

The New Map
The New Map exhibition is intended as a contribution to the debate on how local, small-scale manufacturing can form part of a strategy for long-term, sustainable economic and social development. Redrawing of the global consumption and production map is already under way. Just like the food we eat, the products of the future will, to a greater extent, be produced locally, pass through fewer intermediaries, be manufactured on a smaller scale and be fairer for everyone involved. And especially for the environment. To highlight existing production potential and accelerate the redrawing of the map, The New Map project set up 24 partnerships between designers and manufacturers in Skåne, a region of southern Sweden. The partnerships featured in the exhibition include Mats Theselius and Pearl Microphones, who produced a comfort-grip handheld microphone, Liv Andersson and Blommiga Gredelina, who created a knitted unisex kimono-kaftan, Maria E. Harrysson and Skillinge Emalj, who produced an enameled lamp, and Studiotrojka and Jonas Larsen, who developed a new technique for blowing glass using moulds made from fresh willow.

The exhibition project is a testing ground for a new collaborative model that involves taking collective responsibility for maintaining existing manufacturing and creating the conditions for it to continue. The model also aims to arrive at a fairer financial split between designer and manufacturer, tailored to today’s manufacturing. All the featured pieces will be available to purchase through The New Map online shop. A catalogue describing all the partnerships has been produced to accompany the exhibition. The catalogue also includes articles by four freelance writers, Ingrid Sommar, Katja Pettersson, Stefan Fölster and Eva Engquist, offering their views on some of the issues and perspectives concerning present and future manufacturing.

The New Map is a co-production with the Form/Design Center in Malmö, with financial support from Region Skåne and the City of Malmö. The exhibition appeared at the Form/Design Center this fall and will move on to Vandalorum in Värnamo after Nationalmuseum Design. The exhibition is curated and designed by industrial designer Jenny Nordberg.

Women Pioneers
The exhibition Women Pioneers – Swedish Design in Between the Wars will feature works by 20 artists and designers, some well known and some less so, including Tyra Lundgren, Anna Petrus, Estrid Ericson, Wilhelmina Wendt, Kitty von Otter and Sylvia Stave. In all, there will be 150 featured pieces from Nationalmuseum’s collections, in a range of materials including cast iron, glass and silver.

Swedish crafts and design enjoyed an upsurge in popularity between the two world wars. The style of this period is often referred to internationally as Swedish Grace and is known in Sweden as early Functionalism. With a few exceptions, the role played by women in this period of inventive and colourful design is rarely highlighted. History has forgotten these female designers. One reason is that modernism as an artistic project was identified with male characteristics. The great artist genius was, according to the contemporary mindset, a man by definition, and only rarely a woman. Another reason is that many of the female artists of the time made their debut in the 1920s, when an ornate, colourful style was in fashion. When tastes changed in the 1930s, these artists were not necessarily successful in reinventing themselves, so they appeared dated and were overlooked. A further reason is that many of them worked for large companies such as Svenskt Tenn and C.G Hallberg, which sought not to highlight individual artists but the company itself. Nor can we disregard the devastating effects of the Second World War, which cut off essential channels of communication and supplies of raw materials essential to artistic production. The postwar generational change accelerated the process whereby older generations of artists, male and female alike, were forgotten.

For a long time, Nationalmuseum took on the task of educating public taste, which stood in the way of breadth in the acquisition policy. Coupled with a lack of funding for new acquisitions, this meant that many significant design objects from the interwar years were absent from the museum’s collections. So, in 2012, Nationalmuseum launched a project to actively collect works by female design pioneers. The results can be seen in this exhibition, in which half of the pieces were acquired in the past two years. The most significant acquisition is a collection of works by Sylvia Stave, produced during a short but intense period of the artist’s career. However, for various reasons the exhibition will not include textile art or furniture. An exhibition catalogue in Swedish will be available, with articles by Magnus Olausson, Christian Björk, Anders Bengtsson, Micael Ernstell and Jessica Kempe. The exhibition is co-produced by Nationalmuseum and Läckö Castle, and curated by Magnus Olausson.

The two exhibitions, The New Map and Women Pioneers – Swedish Design in Between the Wars will be on show at Nationalmuseum Design located inside Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm from 4 December 2015 to 14 February 2016.

Press contact
Hanna Tottmar, Press Officer, hanna.tottmar@nationalmuseum.se, +46 767 23 46 32

Caption
Items from the exhibition The New Map; Anna Petrus, Candlesticks with lions playing the flute, 1923-24 and Tea Jar with Lid.