June 6 is Sweden's National Day, so I thought about writing something on Swedish art... But since that is quite impossible in so many ways in a single blog post, I tried a Google search on "swedish art" and look what I found at the top — a photo of  Dala horses! I thought some old fin-se-siécle artist like Anders Zorn, Bruno Liljefors or Carl Larsson (the so-called ABC of Swedish art) would be the result, but it was actually just Larsson who made it to the top ten on my search. So here we go, the Dala horse!

Many tourists traveling to Sweden get to know the Dala horse even if they do not visit its origin, the region of Dalarna. It is sold as a souvenir all over the country, but of course you should really buy them in the village of Nusnäs where they are made today. It is hand made, carved in pine and painted in a pattern that is about 150-160 years old. The red horse is the most famous, but as you can see, they come in many colors and sizes. It is also used as design and decoration on almost anything you can imagine. It can even be found as monumental sculpture in various places in Dalarna, and in some American cities with communities of Swedish immigrants. 

I must say that the Dala horse is probably as exotic for me as for any tourist from abroad. For Swedes it is the symbol of Dalarna (I bought my horse on a vacation-trip), and perhaps it is also a reminder of an agricultural period long gone preserved by making it a tourist attraction and a cultural heritage. Originally the horse was made as a toy and sold as an extra income for farmers from Dalarna on annual periods of working in factories in Stockholm. They were then sold as souvenirs to tourists from Stockholm visiting Dalarna from late nineteenth century. In the late 1930s the Dala horse was exposed in international exhibitions in Paris and New York, and that is probably when its international fame begun and it became a symbol of Sweden. 

Sometimes I use the Dala horse as a start when discussing ethnicity and post-colonialism with students on seminars. I think it is useful to start discussing your own national stereotypes before making statements on other cultures and nations. To see how familiar, but in a sense strange, icons are created and why. I then end the discussions with a newer version of the Dala horse, the Rinkeby horse, that appeared in the 1990s. The artist Ylva Ekman wanted to create a symbol of the contemporary Sweden and started to paint small plastic toy camels, tigers, elephants, and other animals with the pattern of a Dala horse. She calls them Rinkeby horses after a multicultural suburb of Stockholm, stereotypically used in media as a metaphor for opportunities and problems connected to immigration. She still uses the pattern on different animals, the examples below are from 2007, since they have become quite popular (and you can find more on her art here: http://www.swedishart.se/ylva.ekman/). Would it not be fun if this also made it to the tourist shops at Arlanda International airport?