Sometimes it gets wild out there! Umeå is inaugurating the Umeå 2014: European Capital of Culture this weekend and it started off with a aggressive situation. The graffiti artist Carolina Falkholt was working on a piece that will be part of the inauguration festivities, when a man comes up and screams at her and pushes her (she even claims he hit her). There was probably some misunderstanding that led to this incident, but still it ended up too violently. And the artist's work have been discussed in local media during the week, as well as in national media for some months —why? Because she is a graffiti artist and (among other things) paints vaginas.

Oh the horror! The vulgarity! And you know what, she even does it at schools so teenagers can see them! For ages the female genitalia have been both exposed and obscured, in art and in real life. It is connected to (male/heterosexual) sex and lust and because of this considered filthy (men can even catch nasty diseases from them). But it has also been part of the modern women's movement with artists like the American Judy Chicago (see her famous Dinner Party: http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/dinner_party/home.php) . It was a way of gaining control over your own body and its symbolic interpretations. In so many cultures words for female genitalia are still used for cursing, blaming and shaming.

I see Carolina Falkholt's art, here represented by a photo from an installation at Gothenburgs Art Museum called Matrialutmattning from 2011, as part of this tradition of empowering women's bodies and female experiences. She uses an art form that is beginning to be accepted by the art world, but not in society where it is still mostly connected to vandalism. She both questions the heterosexual norms that corners the nude female body to exclusive sexual interpretations, and depict new erotic images. Falkholt's art is not safe and not everybody will like what she does, but please, stay off the violence!

The last few days I have been participating in a "game" on Facebook that has the intention of filling Facebook with art. If you "like" someones chosen image, you get a mission of finding an artwork of an artist and post it on your wall. And since you mention the person who gave you the artist, the illustration also appears on his/her wall. Is it a silly game? Perhaps, but now my wall has a fine gallery of female artist. You also get a chance to find new artists and art works, both my assignments (so far) where of artists I did not  know much of. The contemporary Berlinde de Bruyckere (b. 1964), an artist from Belgium, and the Swedish artist Anna Palm de Rosa (1859-1924) who made the above watercolor called Speed ticket at Bois de Boulonge. And it sure is a break from the usual Facebook entries, selfies and food (that I also contribute to). So play the game, explore the art world and have fun!

Today we celebrate a most important birthday. 17 January is when Art was born when someone dropped a sponge into a bucket of water — 1,000,051 years ago. All according to Fluxus artist Robert Fillion in 1963.

Today this event seems more celebrated in music than my preferred media, and on the website of Sveriges Radio (http://sverigesradio.se/sida/default.aspx?programid=3676) you can link to many European events.

Happy birthday!

Winter has come to Umeå with snow and freezing temperatures, but 2014 is an exciting year since the city is selected as European Capital of Culture (together with Riga). On the official homepage you will find everything you need concerning Umeå 2014 (http://umea2014.se/en/). My first contribution to the festivities (officially starting 31 January) is a blogpost on one of my favorite artists, Vera Frisén. Loved by many here in Umeå, but perhaps not so known outside Västerbotten.

Frisén made a number of portraits, but she was mainly a landscape artist. She found her motif in the outskirts of Umeå and in other regions of Västerbotten, and even if she moved to other parts of Sweden she kept her focus on her native province. Not only that, the majority of her paintings depicts the landscapes in a summer twilight. It puts them in a melancholy mode, like a bittersweet sensation, that also gives the paintings a liminal quality. It is as if nature is standing on the threshold to a new day, a new season, or to some environmental change that might occur. The above painting, called Myr (Bog) dated to the 1970s, shows one of her main motifs, the silhouettes of pine trees on a misty bog on a summer night.

Vera Frisén (1910-1990) made her solo debut at an exhibition in Stockholm 1941, and she held just a few solo exhibitions after that. But she worked continually and exhibited occasionally in collaboration with others until her death. She is still exhibited with some regularity, and will be included in Västerbottens Museum's Resenärens blick (http://www.vbm.se/sv/se-and-gora/utstallningar/2014/resenarens-blick.html) opening on 2 February and lasting throughout the year (at least). If you want to know more of Vera Frisén's landscape paintings, read art historian Felicia Tolentino's dissertation Porträtt av ett landskap: Vera Friséns gestaltning av naturen i Västerbotten from 2008.