Keeping Midwest culture alive

As stimulus spending goes, the impact of the $25,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant to the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures is fairly easy to quantify. It’s worth one associate director.

That is, it keeps Ruth Olson, the center’s lone full-time employee, in her job of eight years supporting the research, preservation and presentation of the diverse languages and folk art of the Midwest region.

The center has called the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus home since the center was established — with Olson’s guidance — in 2001, and it pulls together faculty with expertise in linguistics, American Indian studies, yodeling, humor, landscape architecture and the formation of ethnic identities who teach and write about and even perform examples of the cultural traditions that make Upper Midwest unique.

“The College of Letters & Science has begun to very generously support my salary, but that support is being phased in,” Olson says. “We are in an important bridging period, and I don’t have to tell you what has happened to the endowments of foundations and all sort of donors.”

The NEA grant keeps the center from depleting further its own endowment, allowing Olson to keep the organization going as a source of information and guidance on local culture for teachers and other arts agencies.