The American Swedish Institute’s Molly Wright Steenson on Crafts, Cultures, and Communities
ASI’s president and CEO loves to make connections—in the neighborhood and around the world
Interview by Mary-Margaret Zindren, CAE | May 1, 2025
Photo by Chad Holder.
2025 PRINT ANNUAL
This interview appeared in the 2025 ENTER print annual, available for purchase here.
Dr. Molly Wright Steenson took the helm of the American Swedish Institute (ASI) two years ago. Her background as a celebrated academic and researcher in architectural history and artificial intelligence informs her very people and place-centered leadership of one of Minnesota’s most beloved cultural institutions. ENTER publisher Mary- Margaret Zindren sat down with Dr. Steenson to explore the unexpected connections and insights that animate her work.
The American Swedish Institute is so unique. People might stop by to see an art exhibit and discover your great gift shop and café. But there’s so much more to the American Swedish Institute. You process emergency passports for Swedish citizens, for example. What else does ASI do that people may not know about?
To start, we put on 450 unique programs a year. We do programs with the Minneapolis Public Schools and Hope Academy, and with churches and Head Start programs. For people of all ages, we offer language classes in Swedish, Finnish, and North Sámi—one of the Indigenous languages of Sápmi, which is the region of the Sami people. And we have literary courses and partnerships, and handcraft courses in wood carving and textiles.
We’re deeply connected to maker communities in the Twin Cities, in the Upper Midwest, and across the world. We have agreements with the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, and Sätergläntan, which is a 100-year-old craft school in Sweden, so we’re able to help float visiting makers back and forth and realize a larger community. We do courses in Nordic Table—cooking and baking, experiencing Nordic cuisine and Swedish cuisine. And we do lots of live music events and lectures.
What’s coming up at ASI that you’re excited about?
An exhibition from Salad Hilowle will be opening in June. Salad is a Swedish artist who emigrated from Somalia when he was seven. He works in multiple media; he’s known in Europe and is about to be known here. We’re doing this exhibition in partnership with the Somali Museum of Minnesota. The Somali diaspora includes Minnesota and Sweden, so there are often family or community connections between the two. Sweden today is about 20 percent immigrant, and I think that the exploration of Swedish America and contemporary Sweden is really dynamic and interesting. The exhibition might challenge some preconceived notions of what we think Sweden is or might have been.
I understand that ASI works to be a community connector within the Phillips West neighborhood. Tell me more about that.
As I see it, you can’t take the S out of ASI—there will always be a Swedish angle to what we do. And you can’t take ASI out of 2600 Park Avenue—these beautiful buildings in this vibrant corner that we’re on, in the middle of Phillips West. As we look at our future, what are we doing to be one of the anchors in our neighborhood? We should understand what we do in those terms. We’re visible, we’re present. We work to bring people together through understanding cultural values of openness and recognition of humanity, of creativity.
Steenson at the entrance to the Carriage House, which was recently renovated by HGA. Photo by Chad Holder.
This building has been lauded for blending the old and the new, reflecting both traditional and modern Scandinavian design. What do you most appreciate about it?
Our museum gets it right, I think. I’ve spent a lot of time in Sweden, and there’s a way that buildings feel. The sense of being well held. The way light passes through here at all times of day is just beautiful. The details of things, like the reindeer leather wrapping on the banister.
This building [the Nelson Cultural Center] was the first LEED-Gold museum in Minnesota when it was built in 2012. Underneath the parking lot are geothermal wells that go as deep as a high-rise is high. This is a historic preservation project as well; we have a 33-room historic mansion [on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971] connected to this contemporary building that we’re sitting in. And there’s a very interesting story that HGA, our architects, can tell about the tectonics—how they explored every possible connection between the new building, the historic building, and the carriage house.
We’re looking ahead to another round of renovations for the mansion. I want to believe that someone can nerd out with me on the infrastructural questions, because I think geothermal is really cool. HVAC too, and pulling knob-and-tube wiring . . . I mean, it’s everyone’s nightmare and everyone’s fascination.
I have every confidence you will find those nerds in Minnesota. Can you tell me more about your connection to architecture over the years?
Well, to be clear, I’m an architectural historian, not a studio-trained architect, but Minneapolis and St. Paul were the cities that made me love architecture— the Ecolab building [now Osborn370] and the many works of Cap Wigington [the first Black municipal architect in the U.S.] near where I grew up in St. Paul’s Mac-Groveland neighborhood, including three schools I attended. I took my first architectural history class at the University of Minnesota in 1992. I fell in love with Peavey Plaza, and with the Weyerhaeuser Chapel at Macalester College, which I think is an unsung beauty of local architecture. And one of my best friends in grade school is now the local architect James Garrett Jr. [FAIA] of 4RM+ULA.
“We’re visible, we’re present. We work to bring people together through understanding cultural values of openness and recognition of humanity, of creativity.”
Your academic research and talks have focused on the intersection of design, architecture, and the history of artificial intelligence. What launched this focus for you, and do you see connections between AI and ASI?
So, AI is actually now 70 years old. I started working with the Web in 1994 and was a UX consultant—one of the early ones. In 2003, I became an interaction design professor in Italy, and after that I got my master’s and my PhD.
I’ve given a number of talks about artificial intelligence and Sloyd, which is a traditional handcraft pedagogy. Sloyd developed as a mode of education starting in the 1870s and is a mandatory part of Sweden’s educational system between grades five and eight. At its core, Sloyd is about knowledge of material and development of dexterity. You don’t have the teacher showing you what to do; the teacher gives you an idea, and then you work it out together. You learn from your peers. You’re given the responsibility of the tools.
When people in Swedish government talk about innovation, when they talk about Sweden’s AI strategy, they talk about the importance of Sweden’s educational system. Baked into Swedish innovation is that kind of knowledge that developed through craft.
As we look at a world that might be governed not only by the large language models of four enormous tech companies, but also by those of smaller companies like DeepSeek, we no longer have just a big monolithic tech thing coming at us. We start seeing that there are other ways through—a world in which we are developing with and for, or around, artificial intelligence in different ways.
Our experiences with our hands, with our knowledge, with our contexts, with each other—these interactions ground us. We’re all hearing scary narratives right now that we’ll be eaten alive by technology. Maybe there’s a way that we come together here at ASI and know ourselves better, in interaction with one another—a way that we can better understand how we want to work with these technologies.
And how does this further connect to the work of architecture?
Nordic cultural values around AI and other advanced computation give us a different way to understand where we stand in the world. When it comes to architecture, how do we want to use tools around AI and form and generation? How do we want to use AI in architectural practice and in the management of firms? In our workflows? In what we even train models on? In our renderings? And in what our interning students are doing?
Steenson in ASI’s Nelson Cultural Center, designed by HGA. Photo by Chad Holder.
One of the things that I value so much about architectural education and architectural practice is that you learn to draw, visualize, quantify, visualize in two dimensions, visualize in three dimensions, model, render, build, critique, write, theorize, and bounce ideas off each other. Architects are remarkably well-rounded individuals. There is so much in the architect’s tool kit and mindset and understanding of the built environment that can teach us how to lead and see and be.
ASI is just now embarking on a new strategic planning effort. What are you most excited about for the future?
How we grow for new audiences and our existing audiences—what that’s going to look like. I don’t think we’re looking to increase our physical footprint, but I want more people to come in our doors and also to experience us digitally. How might we do that? How can we be even more relevant for Sweden and for Minneapolis? How do we continually interpret this interesting space of Swedish America, which is different than Sweden and has many of its own flavors? It’s all going to come through how we interact with people.
I’m wild about making connections and plugging people in where they might not have previously. Connections are made as people’s lives change and grow, and we bring people together. One personal example: A Swede who lives in Wisconsin came in to get information for her children. In my role as the Honorary Counsul for Sweden, I was looking at her paperwork, and I saw that she was from the Swedish town of 64 people that my family is from.
It turns out she was related to a woman named Ruth who lived in that town, who was the mother of my cousins. Ruth met me when I was six years old and then again when I was 41. The woman who stopped by ASI recalls seeing my cousins walking on the mountain with Ruth. And one of my cousins remembers seeing her. So, how does this happen? That’s the amazing thing: The more connections we have, the more connections we can build.
Each new person who engages with ASI brings their whole world of connections with them.
And if you want to understand what it is to keep folk practices alive, including for reinterpretation, or to maintain a connection to family or heritage, that’s what that is. It isn’t something that gets ossified or is set in stone; it’s a living practice.
You seem very energized by your work. How great for you and for ASI!
It really is a joy to be here in Minnesota, in this position, with the opportunity to learn from this place and its history and all the people here. To be in a place to connect people. It’s an approach to leadership and a way to live life. It’s enormous fun and just so deeply meaningful to do this here at ASI, in my home state. It’s awesome to be back.
Related Articles
