|
Baltic Imports Celebrating the spirit of traditions The Baltic Imports Story Humanitarian Aid, a Store, and a Great Passion In the mid-1970’s a young Latvian woman who had been born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Germany and her Irish fiancé journeyed to Soviet Latvia to be married in St. Francis Church, in Riga. It was an unheard of thing. There, in the ancient city spread out along the shores of the great Daugava , the young bride brought the two estranged halves of her family together, joining her moment of celebration with the life of her people. The young couple, moved by the graciousness they found there, continued to come to Latvia, year after year, collecting folk tales, learning folk customs, and documenting life under the great stagnation. He learned traditional amber working and healing under great teachers. She learned root weaving, card and loom weaving, knitting, bronze jewelry and Latgallian ceramic traditions. Soon their children came as well and learned. In 1987 they supported the rise of Latvian writing, visual art, photography and film. They helped the Riga Film Studio journey to America and film the trimdinieki, the people of exile. They hosted a great director as he showed the first pure Latvian film seen in decades, about a childhood in Latgale, to the Western World. Together with artists and family they fought for independence and began to journey to Estonia and Lithuania until a band of hands was held across the three countries. In 1991, while in Latvia with her children, Ingrida wrote back to her husband Sean, what it meant to watch the countries become independent. She also wrote that Sean was invited to be the first American artist to be shown in the Foreign Art Museum. The five long rooms that came to hold his show of drawings and paintings were soon filled with row upon row of flowers, set on the floor by simple people, until there was little place to walk. In 1992, Ingrida and Sean watched the collapse of the village potters, the last of the ribbon-weaved linen tablecloths being made, and the village music masters who made such graceful sliding kazoos out of sweet birch being lured away to higher priced jobs in Germany. Little to no flax had been sown. Its price was less than hay. The agrarian calendar of ritual, after surviving hundreds of years and carrying a mythology a thousand years old, was breaking down. Everywhere and in everything was a great reordering. It was then that the couple went beyond humanitarian aid and began to actively support the folk arts, for it was the folk arts that mirroring ancient mythologies and celebrating the simple stages of life, the folk arts which had given identity to generation upon generation of Northern and Eastern Europeans. In 1992, Ingrida and Sean established Baltic Imports, the retail division of Baltic Trade International, Inc., dedicated to “Preserving and Celebrating the Spirit of Traditions.” The artists that they first carried are all now in National Museums. The amber masters that they still carry have now been recognized the world over. The couple, as passionately concerned as ever, offer a world of meaning in personally selected, non-manufactured, correctly handmade artifacts by culturally recognized artists still immersed in the culture of their country, region, or ethnic group. Each must pass Ingrida’s test of cultural authenticity, knowledge, and gentle compassion, and Sean’s aesthetics forged under the lectures of Joseph Campbell, solidified by the heroic nature of the late Douglas Fraser of Columbia University in New York City, and by the master folk artists who have tirelessly taught them both. |