Lily Lorenzen Scholarship — 2024 Winner Tara Sweeney

The Lilly Lorénzen Scholarship is a competitive scholarship awarded to one individual each year, providing support for academic and/or professional studies abroad in Sweden. 

It was established in 1980 by friends, students, and relatives of Lilly Lorénzen, the late Swedish-language instructor who taught at both the University of Minnesota and the American Swedish Institute and author of the book Of Swedish Ways. She was also a respected builder of Swedish heritage in America. More information about Lilly’s life and contributions can be found here. 

2024’s Lilly Lorénzen Scholarship was awarded to Tara Sweeney, an award-winning teaching artist and illustrator. Tara spent May 2025 sharing her book, A to Zäåö, with two Swedish museums and studying Nordic watercolor and picture book illustrations. 

What drew you to apply for the Lilly Lorénzen Scholarship? 

I dreamed of bringing our collaborative picture book, A to Zåäö: Playing with History at the American Swedish Institute (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) to Sweden since it was published. I wanted to share the story of what Swedish immigrants carried to Minnesota nearly two centuries ago. The Lilly Lorénzen scholarship enabled me to transcend boundaries—physical, cultural, and creative—to share this unique story of place, identity, and belonging through art.

To create our MN Book Award finalist picture book, my son, Nate Christopherson, and I chose twenty-nine Swedish verbs—one for each letter of the Swedish alphabet—to accompany the cast of characters he drew in ink, right over the top of my watercolors of immigrant artifacts from the museum’s historic collection. ASI’s exhibition, extra/ordinary, showcased the historic objects and the book’s illustrations. 

Can you describe the project or focus of your study in Sweden? 

I contacted Swedish museums and was invited by two to share A to Zäåö, exchange visitor engagement methods, and study their collections and exhibits. Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, located in Skärhamn on Sweden’s west coast archipelago, is a 25-year-old museum founded by the Nordic Watercolor Society and Tjörn Municipality to promote collaboration in watercolor art and technique. Göteborg Konstmuseet, located in Sweden’s second-largest city, is a century-old museum with the largest collection of Nordic picture book illustrations in Sweden. To improve my Swedish, I book-ended my travel with homestays in Swedish-speaking families: one week with a family on a farm close to the Norwegian border, and one week with a family in Stockholm. I kept a sketchbook and journal of these experiences.     

How did you prepare for your trip? 

After I was awarded the 2024 Lilly Lorénzen scholarship, I completed two semesters of Swedish at the University of Minnesota before my departure. 

What were some of the most meaningful discoveries you made during your time in Sweden? 

Nordiska Akvarellmuseet’s 25th anniversary exhibit, A World of Pattern, showcased two centuries of watercolor in the design process, revealing a dissolving line between fine art and design out of which Scandinavia has emerged as a key player. Stories of creatives displaced by disaster and war were woven into the exhibit. Solvi Helgason, an early 19th-century Icelandic wanderer, carried materials and paper on his back and traded art and storytelling for room and board—on one side of the paper, intricate patterns filled the page, while the other side overflowed with his poetry and philosophy.  

I shared my curriculum for Story Beast, a collaborative form I developed first as a residency project for extra/ordinary and later as a workshop in conjunction with ASI’s exhibit, Paper Dialogues: The Dragon and Our Stories.

Göteborg’s Konstmuseum staff welcomed me with fika, followed by visits to their picture book illustration archive and the paper conservation studio. I noticed that many Nordic picture books are distinct in plot structure, color palette, and topics from their happy-ending American counterparts. In the Fürstenberg gallery, featuring Carl Larsson’s artwork, it was fascinating to see how he diverged from his early Impressionist training in France and, upon returning to Sweden, developed his iconic ink line and watercolor style. 

I viewed memorable exhibits at museums that I did not work directly with. The picture book process and illustrations in the Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde exhibit, “From Moomin to Chop Chop,” showcased picture book illustration from the mid-1940s to the present day through the work of Tove Jansson, Ilon Wikland, Pija Lindenbaum, and Linda Bondestam. Artepelag’s exhibit, Lars Wallin Atelier: 35 Years of Fashion Stories, revealed his process, products, and clients.  

Not everything memorable was in a museum. I stumbled upon Göteborg’s 45th half-marathon course and lingered for hours, taking in the race and the fans. I grew accustomed to the cashless approach to everything. Two days in a row, I jumped in the Baltic before breakfast. I traveled entirely by mass transit. Signage and announcements were only in Swedish. More than one Swede expressed surprise at meeting an American who spoke Swedish. It didn’t matter that I didn’t speak perfectly. It mattered that I tried. I discovered that I could communicate in Swedish in a variety of settings, but the younger the audience, the more easily I could do so. Pre-schoolers are great teachers: they are loud, they repeat themselves, they use short sentences, have limited vocabulary, and love to tell stories. I sketched on trains, buses, boats, in lush gardens, cozy cafes, and returned with a sketchbook rich in memories. 

How do you see this experience influencing your future creative or teaching work?  

The boundary-crossing experiences that the Lilly Lorénzen scholarship supported will influence my creative process and more. I hope some of the wonderful exhibits I viewed will come to ASI, and I’ll have the opportunity to connect ASI visitors and students to them. I’d love to return and teach a watercolor class in Sweden. I am taking Intermediate Swedish at the University of Minnesota and am looking forward to expanding my conversational skills. 

About Tara Sweeney

Award-winning teaching artist and illustrator, Tara Sweeney, is a professor emerita of art and design with Augsburg University and a popular painting and sketching instructor.  

Her collaborative picture book, A to Zåäö: Playing with History at the American Swedish Institute (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) was a 2020 MN book award finalist and the inspiration for ASI’s extra/ordinary exhibition in 2020. TPT2’s MN Original documented her creative process on the book. ASI welcomed her for a six-month artist’s residency, funded in part by the MN State Arts Board, to illustrate objects from ASI’s historic collection for the book. 

She has been an instructor and frequent collaborator at ASI since 2016 when, inspired by Lars Lerin’s watercolors, she first taught a watercolor workshop for the museum. Since then, she has taught nearly one hundred painting and sketching experiences on a variety of topics tapping her expertise and enthusiasm for design, illustration, watercolor, and place making.