Today we’d like to introduce you to Linda Christensen.
Hi Linda, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I was the first married woman with children to attend the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Before I applied, I had to take a GED test to receive a high school diploma, learn to drive, and find a job to earn enough money for tuition. Before I could get a job, I applied for a social security number and was hired by a factory that made flags, parades, and holiday decorations. That was in 1967. I was accepted for the 1968 school year. I had no idea what I would do with a degree in the visual arts, I only knew I was being called to my basement after my children’s bedtime to make clay figures on a card table and those efforts were not enough.
The MCAD college placement officer called me with requests from the community for students to do projects for them. I accepted every offer that came my way. I did figures for a carnival shooting gallery, illustrations for a medical publication, and painted signs for a construction site to name a few.
After I graduated, the placement officer called me with one of the crazier sounding jobs: to spend every day of the Minnesota State Fair in a cooler, each day doing a candidate for, and the winner of, the Princess Kay of the Milky Way contest out of butter. The twelve young women I sculpted each year were all from family dairy farms or farm workers. Every day I spent carving a princess’s likeness we engaged in conversations. I chose over thirty of the women, spanning the fifty years I have been the official butter sculptor. Their stories represent some major themes regarding farm life how it affected their ongoing life choices and how those choices have affected them. I interwove their stories with my own to publish the book “Princess Kay and Me.”
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
I have covered some of the struggles along the way in my previous answer. I will add that I dropped out of high school because I was hospitalized during a medical crisis arising from generalized myasthenia gravis (gMG).
Following surgery that the U of M hospital had only done once before and lost that patient, I improved over a period of a few years.
I ran out of money after my first semester of college and told my design instructor I would have to take the next semester off to go back to work. Later the dean of students called me to his office to tell me a patron of the arts and the father of Minnesota governor Mark Dayton would pay my tuition for the rest of my education there.
In short, yes there were several struggles but always small miracles that followed.
What do you think about happiness?
The most interesting aspect of what I have done at the fair is that those butter sculptures, carved from ninety-pound blocks of butter go on to live a life of their own after the fair, often for years. Sometimes they are displayed in the glass-fronted freezers of the princess’s hometown grocery stores, sometimes served at a corn feed for her whole town. Some have traveled to county fairs every year for years, a couple has gone to New York to visit the Dave Letterman show. Some remain in family farm freezers for decades.
It makes me happy that the princesses and their families come back to the fair year after year to visit me and update their many unique stories. I believe that the actual “art” of what I do is not so much the butterheads themselves but the culture that has arisen around them.
Pricing:
- Kirk House Publishing, paperback $18.95
- Amazon, paperback $18.95
- Amazon, hardcover $22.95
- Amazon Kindle, $4.99
