A Swedish artist observing America

(By: Dinah and Steve)

We met Dinah’s Swedish friend, Lisa Liedgren, in Joshua Tree for coffee where she was in the midst of an artist residency at BOXO. (See more on this below.) After ~28 years in the USA, she is moving back to her homeland of Sweden. We asked her what she would enjoy about rejoining her home culture and she said that she was looking forward to “the roundness of a shared reality”.  Brilliantly put ..  this hits home given how little we Americans can even agree on what is a fact.

On the other hand, having to always fit into ‘this is the way we do things’ is not something she is looking forward to. Lisa says “chaotic anxiety makes things interesting” in the United States.

She also described relationship building in the US as most often ‘transactional’, meaning that very early in a new connection, we’re testing for usefulness, rather than commonality. We both are still noodling on this, however it is well known that in the US, we are known for asking ‘what do you do’ (for money) really early in a dialogue.

We did find that in our time in Finland, an introduction to someone most often led to a long exploration of a topic … society, history, personal history, industry … something that required coming to a deeper understanding of each other. It could take a long time before action would be taken on potential new friendship or business connection. In other words: time to establish commonality and it starts with a genuine curiosity that feels worthy of pursuing.

Lisa’s residency at BOXO, founded by Bernard Leibov, represents the creativity that can happen in the US beyond the pursuit of dollars and cents–an example of benefactors providing the space, time and inspiring location to support an artist taking her work to the next level. See her work here.

Thanks, Lisa, for giving us some hope and inspiration and lots to think about!