Christensen Releases Story Chronicling Her Years as a Butter Sculptor | Minneapolis College of Art and Design

Christensen Releases Story Chronicling Her Years as a Butter Sculptor

February 21, 2022
A woman is shown carving a bust of another woman out of butter

Linda Christensen ’72 has opened pre-orders for her upcoming book Princess Kay & Me: Stories About the Minnesota Butterheads and Much More.

Little did Christensen know when she walked into a 40-degree, rotating cooler in 1972 that, inside that cooler, over the next 50 fairs, she would carve 41,500 pounds of butter into the likenesses of more than 550 young women involved in dairy farming.

In that time, traditions developed around the “butterheads” including the lives they go on to live after the fair, some as centerpieces on wedding tables, in cookie dough for hundreds of holiday baking exchanges, at town corn feeds, and church pancake breakfasts. Some remain in farm family freezers for decades.

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The Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) acknowledges it is located on traditional, ancestral, and contemporary lands of Indigenous people. This is the ancestral homeland of the Dakota and Ojibwe people, who were forcibly exiled from the land because of aggressive and persistent settler colonialism. We recognize that this place has a complex and layered history. As a community dedicated to creativity, MCAD is committed to ongoing efforts to support and advocate for American Indian Nations and peoples.