North Country Women

Rebecca  Velde grew up in the small town of Hibbing, Minnesota. Her father was an architect and a fisherman. She learned very early how to draw in 2 point perspective and how to catch and filet a Walleye. From her mother, she learned to love the woods.​

 Hibbing, in Northern Minnesota, is known as The Town That Moved, The Grand Canyon of the North, Worlds Largest Open Pit Mine, Iron Capital of the World. When she had just learned to read, she saw a sign outside a bar that said, "No Minors Allowed." She thought, why can't Miners go in there?

She remembers fondly being nine years old, catching crappies off the dock, and playing with frogs and turtles. She had two brothers and a sister, and the family spent summers at the lake.  ​​

Velde, Sandberg then graduated from Hibbing High School in 1971 with a class size of 465. So many different ethnicities have peopled the town there since 1893 for work, first logging and then in the iron ore mines.

She studied art and art history, starting at Hamline University, St Paul, MN. Her wandering years took her on a backpacking trip to Europe, where she saw, in person, the work of the artists she had been studying.

Then she went to Alice Lloyd College, Pippa Passes, KY, where she studied the people and struggles of the coal industry,  and the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, to learn about ancient Chinese painters. She graduated from the University of Iowa with a BFA. Here she practiced intaglio printmaking in Mauricio Lasansky's incredible printmaking shop.   Missoula, MT, has been her home ever since. ​

She is primarily interested in people and what they get up to, what they have to do to survive, and what they do for fun. Her subjects are everyday hard-working people, their pets, and their accouterments.