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Book Cost: $35.00 USD
The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County is pleased to announce the recent publication of a long-awaited book about two of Clay County’s favorite painters.Prairie Daughters: The Art and Lives of Annie Stein and Orabel Thortvedt by Markus Kreuger, Mark Peihl, and Lisa Vedaa has been a decade in the making. In 2013, the year-long exhibit at the Hjemkomst Center featured the works of Annie Stein of Georgetown and Orabel Thortvedt of rural Glyndon. Both women were well known in their time frames –1872-1923 for Annie Stein and 1896-1983 for Orabel Thortvedt.
Their stories, though very different from each other, highlight lives lived for their art. Annie Stein was a self-taught painter, photographer, song-writer, and needle-worker. The middle child of nine born to Adam and Wilhelmina Stein, German immigrants among the earliest white settlers of Clay County, Annie spent her entire life on the farm. She learned photography by doing and used photos and images cut out of magazines to teach herself to paint.
“Please do not criticize this work too much for God alone was my master,” Annie wrote on the back of many of her paintings. Art historian Susan Lee notes that Annie’s works exhibit “playfulness, sophistication, imaginative appropriation of found imagery, and a compelling artistic richness.” Lee likes how she “transformed the photographic images” with embellishments that “[enliven] the image and [enhance] the sense of palpable spatial context.”
After her death in 1923, her brothers and sisters cherished her paintings, keeping them together as they moved over the years. Fifty years after Annie’s death, as her last surviving sister moved into a nursing home, her paintings were rediscovered by the community at a 1976 family auction sale. Local collector Kelly Wambach bought up all that he could and documented who else purchased her works. His contributions to the development of the 2013 exhibit and to this book were invaluable.
In contrast to Annie’s self-teaching, Orabel Thortvedt went to the Minneapolis Art School and later the University of Minnesota to learn to paint and sculpt. Orabel was also born to an immigrant family: grandparents Olav and Ingeborg Thortvedt emigrated from Telemark, Norway, in 1861 with their children, including infant Levi. They settled first in Houston County, MN, but in 1870, they moved to Clay County by covered wagon, part of the Buffalo River Settlement. Orabel grew up hearing the stories of immigration and settlement, the old traditions and the new ways, remaining on the farm near Glyndon for much of her life.
Her years in Minneapolis (1930-1936) were spent expanding her small circle and developing a career in animal portraiture among the “high society” of the Twin Cities that continued into the early ‘40s. Orabel returned to the farm permanently in 1936 with the illnesses of both her parents; they died three weeks apart. The Thortvedts were a family of documenters. Orabel journaled and created “scrapbooks” to collect stories and clippings, illustrating them with tiny ink drawings and watercolors. She also created a series of ink drawings to illustrate Levi’s Early History of Red River Valley which was published serially by Moorhead Daily News in 1939. The full story she spent her life preserving was finally published in 2020 as Red River Girl: From Telemark to the Buffalo, a joint project of HCSCC and the Ves-Telemark Museum in Norway.
This limited-edition book features works collected by people all over the country. It contains biographical detail on both women and colorful photos of their ephemera and works in a variety of media. The books are available for sale only at the Heritage Gift Shop inside the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead and via the online store atwww.hcscconline.org/store
This publication was made possible in part by the people of Minnesota through a grant funded by an appropriation to the Minnesota Historical Society from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Any views, findings, opinions, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the State of Minnesota, the Minnesota Historical Society, or the Minnesota Historic Resources Advisory Committee.
Sept 10 there will be a formal book launch with a presentation by Markus Krueger on Annie and Orabel’s important roles in the development of the early local art scene at 6:30pm at the Hjemkomst Center.
