Michael Strand, associate professor and head of the visual arts department, will be honored this month as one of seven award recipients by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts. He is scheduled to receive the college’s Alumni Achievement Award in Art at the university’s annual Honors Day Dinner, which recognizes alumni, faculty, staff and student achievement.
The award will be presented by the college’s Fine and Performing Arts Alumni Board. Strand earned a master of fine arts from UNL in 1999. In addition to receiving the award, he will present a free public lecture on Friday, April 19.
Strand’s projects and exhibitions this past year include the Tallinna Rakendusckunsti Triennaal in Tallinn, Estonia, featuring the second of 10 iterations of his initiative, “The Misfit Cup Liberation Project,” which he launched at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo. The project continues at the 2013 National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts’ Ceramic Biennial in Houston and the “Bowls Around Town Project” at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Ore, for the exhibition “Object Focus: The Bowl.” The project examines the ritual of the contemporary dinner and will be harvesting images, recipes and ruminations that will be made available to the public beyond the exhibition.
Strand’s work has been published internationally, with articles in Ceramics Technical, Studio Potter, Hemslojen, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Public Art Review.
His recent Artstimulus projects were cited in the Yale University Press publication “40 Under 40: Craft Futures” by Smithsonian curator Nicholas Bell.
NDSU is recognized as one of the nation's top 108 public and private universities by the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education.