It’s an exciting time at Perspektivet Museum just now. The newly appointed director Marianne A. Olsen is following up several parallel projects that revolve around the same axis: Sara Fabricius, also known by her pseudonym Cora Sandel. Fabricius lived at the street Storgata 95 in Tromsø for some of the most important years of her youth, a fact which will have an enduring impact on the museum’s programme. Her son Erik Jønsson had close contact with the museum, and when he passed away in 2016, it became clear that he had bequeathed the artist’s large cultural-historical collection to the museum. An extensive project then got underway to register everything from books, furniture and jewellery, to photographs, sketches and awards. This work was considerably boosted when Perspektivet Museum, in late 2018, received NOK 146,000 from the National Archives of Norway, earmarked for organizing and registering Fabricius’s archival material.
Fabricius’s oeuvre consists of paintings and writings, and she is considered one of Norway’s ten best historical authors. The story of her life is also fascinating. She spent long periods of time in Paris, Brittany and Uppsala, but nevertheless spoke of Tromsø as ‘home’.
The Fabricius Collection represents a fantastic opportunity to raise awareness of her artistic and literary production and, not least, to make it available to the public through a larger exhibition which will open in 2020. Until then, Perspektivet Museum will present excerpts from the Fabricius Collection, which we call Saras spor / Traces of Sara, at the museum itself and on our website.