And in the middle of it all, A Fly Swatter

From Journalism to Museum Curator to the Classroom, Curt Lund hasn’t faltered in his love for design or his collecting of it.

Words and photos by Franki Hanke

An unpractical, celebrity-designed lemon squeezer sits behind a perfume bottle filled with water and labeled “Helvetica” and an aged Holiday Inn fly swatter reading “For Emergency Use Only.” Across the table are piled, wooden letterpress pieces while a box of still dirtied, inky letters waiting to be cleaned sit beside them. Then, behind the desk, sits Curt Lund, a relatively new professor in the Digital Media Arts major in his first year as an academic advisor.

Whether one sits down to talk or wanders around the bookshelves littered with collections, Lund’s stories await in that office: where his appreciation and love for typography and the history of design is evident. “Ever since grade school I knew I wanted to work for a newspaper. I created classroom ‘newspapers’ for my 5th grade class,” Lund said. “Within a couple of years after that, our public library computers got Print Shop… I made my first business card in eighth grade—why an eighth grader needed a business card, I don’t know.” freelancing, Lund returned to school at the University of Minnesota’s design program.

“I was interested in curation and exhibit design, but my first semester in grad school, I got a teaching assistantship, and I knew right away teaching was what I actually wanted to do,” explained Lund.

But, this shift to teaching runs And in the Middle of

It All, a Fly Swatter

parallel to the development of his artistic projects, one of which is an example for a theme connecting his work: collections.

“A lot of my artwork is made up of stuff I’ve collected.”

However, late in high school, Lund realized the graphic design he’d been doing for the newspaper was actually it’s own field, so he officially changed from journalism to graphic design for his undergraduate degree at Iowa State.

Eventually, after a stint of working in the nonprofit sector and One such piece is titled East Fremont for the region in Las Vegas it stemmed from. East Fremont featured a collection of screen printed works from signage of old hotels, printed materials related to the area on classic key fobs and maps of the area where the images that inspired it were shot. From the collected photographs to the textual snippets gathered for the key fobs in the installation, the entire project consists of clusters of collected materials, not unlike Lund’s office and home.

Whether out of interest, the hope of implementing them into a project, or sharing them with a class, Lund’s space is spattered with interesting pieces, each with a story behind them. A framed dollar bill from historic Germany bears the value of five million dollars from a period of intense inflation. A vintage advertisement card decorated with a corseted woman advertises the garments for roller skating in the wrong time period. Rubber stamps from an old butcher shop glare out from the dresser, misplaced from their home to an antique shop and now to here.

Perhaps most interesting of all is a relatively simple item that would be easy to pass by unless it was the only thing in the entire room, like it was when Lund arrived to his office at Hamline.

A white and green plastic fly swatter, stolen from a Holiday Inn and bearing its foreboding and confusing message “For Emergency Use Only,” waits in the center of an otherwise empty room, welcoming Lund to a new chapter and a new excuse to collect things.

Molly Dionne

Molly plays on Hamline’s Lacrosse team. She is also a member of the Student Alumni Board, as well as the site manager for Hamline’s Football team.