Exhibition: CONTINUUM
CONTINUUM
From Finnish America to Finland
Continuum will be on exhibit from October 16 – December 6, 2026.
SAVE THE DATE
Friday, October 16, 2026 | 6–8 p.m.
Gallery Valo, University of Lapland
Arktikum, Pohjoisranta 4, 96200 Rovaniemi, Finland
Join Finlandia Foundation National, our artists, and friends from both sides of the Atlantic for the opening reception of Continuum and a celebration of the living connection between Finland and Finnish America. We hope you can join us at the first curated exhibit of the Finlandia Gallery in Finland together with the University of Lapland. The reception will be a celebration of the featured artists and their work as well as the Finlandia Foundation community in Finland.
All are welcome.
About Continuum
Opening Friday, October 16, 2026 | 6–8 p.m.
Gallery Valo | University of Lapland | Rovaniemi, Finland
This fall, Finlandia Foundation National will mark a unique and historic moment: bringing the work of Finnish America to Finland through contemporary art.
In collaboration with the University of Lapland, FFN will present Continuum, an exhibition bringing together Finnish-American artists and friends of Finland whose work and lives intersect with the story of Finlandia Gallery, Finlandia Foundation National, and the broader Finnish-American experience.
For more than 20 years, Finlandia Gallery at the Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock, Michigan, has provided a home for Finnish, Finnish-American, and Finnish-inspired art. When Finlandia University closed in 2023, Finlandia Foundation National assumed stewardship of the Finnish American Heritage Center and its gallery, ensuring that this important platform for artistic expression would continue. FFN is carrying that legacy forward, for the first time, across the Atlantic.
Why Continuum?
A continuum connects an infinite number of points along a path, placing each in relationship with the others without requiring a distinct beginning or end.
The artists of Continuum occupy unique points along such a path. Their work reveals connections stretching across memory, migration, landscape, geography, history, identity, material, and artistic practice. The artistic genre of each of the artists are unique and this show will feature painting, stitching, felting, weaving, sculpture, photography, and etching. Together, they connect ancestral and contemporary experiences and explore the many ways Finland and Finnish America continue to inform one another.
They also represent a continuum of Finlandia Art Gallery itself.
Featured artists Phyllis Fredendall, Heather Hietala, Tia Keobounpheng, Joyce Koskenmaki, and Carrie Vander Veen have each been part of the gallery’s story—as exhibiting artists, curators, educators, leaders, and collaborators. Some are Finnish American; others are friends of Finland whose lives and work have become deeply connected to Finnish culture and community. Each has taken inspiration from that connection in a different direction.
Continuum will also feature works by Finlandia Foundation National Artists of the Year Eric Aho, Väinö Kola, and Arno Rafael Minkkinen, further highlighting FFN’s commitment to recognizing exceptional Finnish and Finnish-American artistic achievement. Works will be drawn from the collection of FFN board member Tim Nurvala and the permanent Finlandia Art collection of the Finnish American Historical Archive.
A Finnish-American Story Comes Full Circle
At the heart of Continuum is Finlandia Foundation National’s commitment to heritage & history and arts, culture & society—and our belief that these are not static things to be preserved behind glass. They are living, evolving, and continually reinterpreted.
For generations, ideas, people, traditions, and creativity have traveled from Finland to North America, taking on new forms within Finnish-American communities. In October, FFN will carry part of that story back across the Atlantic.
From Finland to America. From one generation to another. From Hancock to Rovaniemi.
Continuum celebrates the points that connect us—and the new ones we are still creating.
Continuum will be on exhibit from October 16 – December 6, 2026.
Meet the Artists
Phyllis Fredendall was born in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and studied weaving and the fiber arts in Wisconsin and Michigan. From 1993 she taught fiber and fashion design at Suomi College/Finlandia University. In 1995 she visited Finland for the first time on the team that developed the Bachelor of Fine Arts degree program at Suomi College. They were there to establish the sister relationship with the Kuopio Academy of Craft and Design. She subsequently taught two special technique short courses in Kuopio in Spring 1998. And at the same time learned Finnish felt making processes. At Finlandia University she taught weaving, surface design for textiles and garment design and retired as professor emeritus in 2020.
Phyllis has had artist residencies on Isle Royale National Park, Xanadu in Eagle Harbor, Michigan and at the Huopakeskus in Petäjävesi. In 2023 she was a fellow of the American Scandinavian Foundation studying weaving traditions in Tampere and Rovaniemi. Her work has been exhibited in the US, Canada and Finland. Since 2022 she has taught weaving and other fiber processes for the Finlandia Foundation National Finnish American Folk School in Hancock, Michigan.
Heather Hietala studied painting and sculpture at the University of New Hampshire and textiles at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. She furthered her studies at Penland School of Crafts, Haystack, and Arrowmont. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Asheville Art Museum, Racine Art Museum, Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Atlanta International Museum of Art, Wesserling Textile Museum, France and Singapore Art Museum. Heather’s work is in various private and public collections including the Asheville Art Museum, Racine Art Museum, Gregg Museum of Art & Design, North Carolina Arts Commission, Windgate University, The Biltmore Estate, and Fidelity Investments. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship, a TN Arts Commission Fellowship and two residencies at Centrum Center for the Arts (WA).
Learn more at: www.heatherhietala.com
Tia Keobounpheng is an American artist informed by historic, ancestral, and epigenetic perspectives, who translates her personal reconciliation of an absent narrative in her lineage into complex, geometric, and abstract threads over drawings on wood. Raised in Finnish-American culture, her reconnection to suppressed Sámi bloodlines, ancestral land, and living-relatives in Swedish-Sápmi, is reflected as a technically skilled method that is as disconnected from traditional techniques as she has been from the culture that’s been buried in her blood memory for generations.
Photo: Dan Kennedy
Learn more at: www.tiakeobounpheng.com
Joyce Koskenmäki. I was born in a small Finnish immigrant community. The grandparents didn’t speak English, and my generation was forbidden to speak Finnish. We were expected to become American. I went to college and graduate school and taught painting and drawing in six different colleges. I exhibited my work nationally and internationally including Finland. I have several paintings in the American embassy in Helsinki. I still work daily in my studio where I also do textile work as well as drawing and painting. I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, which is similar in climate and terrain to Finland. We still own the farm which my grandfather built when he came here.
Learn more at www.joycekoskenmaki.com
Carrie Vander Veen’s paintings evoke a sense of wonder through a deliberate embrace of the sensual. Layered beneath the imagery is an exploration of how we choose to live our brief lives, how we balance the analog and digital, what we give power to and what gives us power, what we share with others and what we hold close – decisions made daily that form our experience of the world. Her imagery uses nature as a metaphor for universal life experiences: territoriality, nurturing, solitude, community, mating, extinction, beauty and loss.
“I look to the natural world for solace. The imaginary environments I create are dreamlike, combining both living and extinct species in a swirling vision of life in all its beauty, its conflict, its fragility and ultimately, its interconnectedness. Life is ephemeral, happiness is transitory, suffering persists. I recently described myself as a grain of sand in a sandstorm; unexpectedly perhaps, I find some comfort in that image.”
Vander Veen received her BS in Architecture from the University of Michigan and her MFA in painting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She served as the Director and Curator of the Finlandia Art Gallery in Hancock, Michigan for 23 years.
Learn more at cbvvart.com
Eric Aho is a New England–based painter known for his longstanding engagement with the natural world. Achieved through close observation and unexpected invention, Aho’s paintings place us amidst the sensations of the landscape. His wide-ranging subjects cycle through all seasons and include rivers and ice floes, stars and fireflies, wetlands and meadows, and forests and fields—both surrounding his studio and encountered in the wilderness. Just as perception and memory are fluid and never fixed, Aho moves between abstraction and representation in open exchange with nature’s ceaselessly regenerative elements.
Aho was Finlandia Foundation National’s 2024 Artist of the Year.
Learn more at ericaho.com/home
Väinö Kola, a Finnish-born painter, now resides on the remote island of Deer Isle, Maine. After earning his B.F.A. from Massachusetts College of Art and M.F.A. from Yale University, Kola spent 26 years teaching art at Wheaton College before dedicating himself to painting full-time. His works, often inspired by natural landscapes and characterized by textured, almost pointillist brushwork, are featured in over forty museum and corporate collections across the U.S. and Europe.
Kola was Finlandia Foundation National’s 2025 Artist of the Year.