Michael Strand

By Millie Hanson
Visual Arts Editor

“I don’t make art for other artists.” -Michael Strand

“The budget for the sandbag project was $600, for the whole project, so I didn’t have to go to a grantor, I didn’t have to beg for money, I just did it. [I thought] I’m taking it into my own hands.” -Michael Strand

Michael Strand and his Sandbag Art were first covered in the High Plains Reader on Feb. 3 of this year (“A Little Flair To Throw On The Pile,” by Neal Schloesser). 7,000 people in North Dakota, Minnesota and other states including Michigan, Washington and California made 9,000 custom sandbags to help with Fargo-Moorhead’s yearly battle to staunch the flow of the swollen Red River.

Each person and sandbag had a unique message. Those who would be doing the hardest work – getting sandbags out to the front lines of defense against the encroaching river –  needed a word or a picture of encouragement to keep going. The Red River, burdened by a winter’s worth of heavy snow that was now melting, would wait for no one.

These customized bags were in every pallet of sandbags that sat waiting at the beginning of April to cheer and thank weary volunteers. It seemed only right that volunteers got the ball rolling on this very personal and very unique communiqué.

Strand is an adjunct professor and department head at NDSU. He was the project’s creator. “[This] is framework that other ideas can work off of.” Open source, as he puts it, so other artists can join the conversation.

People in the NDSU art department and students were involved, with thousands of individuals making a contribution to an idea. Students were creating the blanks, which were the framework for others to build on, or as Strand puts it, “they can riff off of.” Bags had both speech bubbles and thought bubbles spray painted on them.

Other faculty and students saw what was happening and got involved. Regin Schwaen, an architecture faculty member, painted 25 gold sandbags to be randomly put in with the others. And no, being from Europe, Strand said he did not get the reference to Willy Wonka and the golden ticket. Kent Kapplinger, a visual art faculty member, was at the advanced printmaking studio for one night until 1am to help students make prints onto sandbags.

But Strand wanted to give everyone in the community a chance to help. “The idea was to provide an opportunity for those who could not physically contribute to still be involved.” Elementary school teachers were contacted via the Creative Arts Studio. Through them, Strand distributed sandbags to every elementary school in the city. 2,500-3,000 students were involved.

He gave the teachers curriculum, in essence, by telling them his thinking behind kids making content for the blank bubbles (either art and/or language). The students could then take part in this huge grassroots effort to thank and support the volunteers who use their physical labor stacking the sandbags.

“I’m very interested in the concept of crowdsourcing,” he says. “A little contribution from a lot of people makes for something really large.” Crowdsourcing, as defined by Wikipedia, is the act of outsourcing tasks, [...] to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call.

Strand also went out to Waterford and Riverview (senior communities) here in the F-M area and got the activities directors of both communities involved. He told me that many of the residents would have been out on the sandbag lines if they were physically able to be part of this community-wide effort.

“I’m not interested in the sandbags as objects of art. I’m interested in them being more like greeting cards.” The residents of these communities, he found out, were deeply conceptual and thoughtful. They really got into the idea and had a lot of fun. It was not about decorating the sandbags for this group, per se, but about thinking and coming up with clever quotes, poems, anecdotes. “Pliable, organic greeting cards,” if you will, moving from one person to the next on the sandbag line.

Initially this project seemed uninteresting to the city of Fargo – and Strand had to move quickly, often with only a day or two notice. No doubt these particular sandbags seemed a minor annoyance if anything considering all that the city flood personnel had to put into action. Fortunately, Dan Mahli (the Fargo city planner) was a big advocate of this project. When Strand went to Sandbag Central the first time, Bruce Grubb, the City of Fargo Enterprise Director, thought it was terrific and really appreciated what Strand was trying to communicate. It unintentionally ended up being an impact on the psychology of the activity, and the city got on board. They even put nine of the bags up in City Hall. Of course a pretty display of nine sandbags was not the point – it was to lift the spirits of people who could see them every day.

There were many players: multiple organizations, two city governments, different states and sandbags coming in and going out constantly. The incredibly fast pace at which the whole thing unfolded sounds unbelievable if you haven’t experienced it before. People from as far away as Washington state, California and Michigan wanted to participate: the Michigan family of an NDSU student heard about the sandbags and wanted some to personalize.  Strand said, “I like the idea that we had people from long distances participating.”

To his students at NDSU, he teaches “concepts of relevance” and thinks visual art has backed itself into a corner. Now art is about connecting back to people, he says of his own work.

The town of Dwight, ND is a related project, really what Strand’s work is all about and the genesis of many of his current projects. He goes to small communities and “gives away work, (it’s the idea) idea of gifting, like Santa Claus.” He laughs. Strand brought 33 cups, one for each home, as the first week in April ended. He says that the cup “became a handshake.” Dwight, ND is a town of only 33 households so word got around quickly. After the mayor Kevin Awender, introduced him, “I ended up in peoples’ houses,...[it became] art advocating for art, and it was a way to meet people. It was a gift that became really personal.” It has since been written up internationally.

To read more about this project, go to the Art Stimulus blog at http://www.artstimulus.org, then find Recent Projects in the middle column, then click on the Dwight, ND link.

“Artists need to engage the public.” One of his mantras is that rather than expecting the public to wake up and go to the gallery, “as an artist, I’m waking up and going to the public. It is up to artists to engage people” He has many upcoming projects that address this new idea.

“I’m looking at existing systems (like the sandbags in our community) where people are involved in something and tapping into the way people are already connected to them.”  He wouldn’t tell me more as they are surprises but did promise to tell me when and where they would happen when the time comes.

“It’s a really rare opportunity for artists.” Strand went on to say that artists and designers know the flood happens every year and that everyone has to deal with it. “Thus it can be planned for and made a bit more tolerable.” He leaves it there, so I guess it’s up to all of us now. What ideas will YOU come up with? What can we all do to help our community when
it needs us?

To see more pictures of Strand’s Sandbag Art, visit: http://qr.net/ZFI or use your smart phone on the Quick Response barcode.

In a side note, the Plains Art Museum is currently requesting input, in the form of a survey, for an upcoming fall exhibition called You Like This: A Democratic Approach to the Museum Collection.  For more information about this, go to http://qr.net/YZV.

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