Yale Undergraduates Discover the Art of the Arctic in Fully Funded Trip to Norway
Yale students from the "Art and the Arctic" course visit Oslo City Hall, Norway, on October 19, 2024.
In October, twelve Yale students and their professors embarked on a unique academic journey that blended classroom learning with firsthand exploration: a week-long trip to Norway to experience Arctic art, culture, and landscapes, funded by the MacMillan Center’s new Course Travel Abroad grant. The trip gave students the opportunity both to interact with the art and its subjects firsthand and to bring their individual interests to the conversation.
Organized as a core component of the “Art and the Arctic” course co-taught this fall by Professor Molly Brunson and PhD student Emily Cox, the itinerary included stops in Tromsø and Oslo, where students explored the Arctic, from fjord cruises and aurora chases to museums filled with Sámi art and nineteenth-century Scandinavian paintings.
The course explores a moment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the polar landscape became a subject of public fascination, explained Cox, a Yale PhD student in History of Art. “From the race to the North Pole to competition for newly discovered resources, artists drew inspiration from a contested landscape that became a grab-bag for European fantasies,” Cox said. “The seminar asks how the Arctic took shape as an aesthetically contested ground.”
“So many of our artists and writers were obsessed with the question of place,” said Brunson, who is Associate Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures, with a secondary appointment in History of Art. “What does the North look like, feel like, sound like? And why might this be differently important for local indigenous populations and for the scientists, colonizers, travelers, and explorers that flocked to the Arctic in the modern age?”
When MacMillan issued the call for proposals for the course travel grant, Brunson and Cox agreed that it presented a unique opportunity to teach this sense of place. They chose Norway so that they could visit significant collections of Sámi and Scandinavian art in Oslo and Tromsø, as well as witness firsthand the majesty of the fjords and northern lights captured in many works from the region.
Students pose with the Northern lights behind them in the morning sky. Photo by EF Wandering Owl.
Their journey began on October 15 in Tromsø, a Norwegian city north of the Arctic Circle known for its dramatic landscapes.
“The trip allowed us to tap into the spirit of adventure that dominates so much of the Arctic art from the last two centuries,” said Brunson, explaining that the group drove six hours in an all-night hunt for the northern lights, finally finding them at the border between Norway and Finland, and were treated with a bonfire, snow angels, and hot soup. They went on a cruise of the fjords, where some brave students also took a pre-dawn Arctic plunge.
These landscapes offered a backdrop that deepened the students’ understanding of the Arctic sublime—a recurring theme in the art and literature they had been studying. Seeing snow-covered fjords and Arctic wildlife helped students contextualize the ways artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Peder Balke depict the North as a space of awe and mystery.
Another central component of the trip was its focus on the art and culture of the Sámi, the indigenous people group inhabiting the region of Sápmi, which today encompasses the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and of the Kola Peninsula in Russia. This focus challenged students to reconsider their assumptions about Indigenous aesthetics and Arctic history.
At the Nordnorsk Museum in Tromsø, students viewed an important collection of Sámi art and had an enlightening conversation about collecting and exhibiting with the senior curator; they also saw an exhibition that put the Navajo artist Ravon Chacon in conversation with local Sámi communities.