In two years, when Fred Hagstrom retires, he’s “throwing all of it away.” Not his career or his legacy — based on the smiling anecdotes I hear whenever I mention Fred’s classes and the impressively extensive history recorded on the internet, it will be a long time before the Rae Schupack Nathan Professor of Art is forgotten — but when he leaves after almost four decades of cultivating the Carleton Art Department, rather than moving the pieces stored in the wall-high pile of file cabinets in the bowels of Boliou and the Weitz, Fred will destroy every print he’s done, “going back to college.”
While this initially shocked me, I can almost understand why he’d do it. Fred’s most well-recognized works — beautiful hand-printed and bound artists books that narrate often-overlooked stories — have already been guaranteed a place in the future. Because of their public relevance, Fred’s books are sought after and have been saved in collections around the world. At one university “one of [his] books is shown to a class almost every single day.” After seeing his works in one of my classes, I sat down with Professor Hagstrom to discuss his teaching, his art, and their relation to public scholarship.
As a professor, Fred has always been an active artist, believing that “art is as much exemplified as it is taught.” From traveling the countryside with Paul Wellstone recording farmers’ opinions on the Farm Crisis to bringing poetry alive with illustration, even his loose, unbound prints have a publicly focused lens. But it wasn’t until the early 1990s when he received a grant to make books as expressly public art that he began bookbinding.
He was always interested in artists that addressed social issues. And artists books, in their single-form, accessible and instructional format, seemed like a good way to “leave something behind, beyond [his] own psyche.” So, through the grant, Fred wrote, printed and bound large editions of narrative books relevant for high school students. They were sent out in packets to random high schools around the state of Minnesota in a “message in a bottle type of way.”
While some books in the collection of four were better received than others, Fred continued working in the medium. Covering stories from around the world, he gained a reputation of creating “bummer books” on slavery, war and disease. But Hagstrom describes that he’s drawn to this type of subject matter not because it’s sad, but rather because he’s often “struck by personal character issues as people react to volatile and unjust situations” and in those narratives, an instructional element is often included.
Perhaps the most locally relevant of Hagstrom’s books is Deeply Honored, which documents the interaction between the Shigemura family and Carleton. Honoring Frank Shigemura, an interned Japanese-American who was enrolled in Carleton and then served in WWII, the memory of a fallen soldier is documented through archival photographs, documents and personal letters turned into art. The book has brought attention to the incredible story of the Carleton administrators who helped resettle inmates from the government’s concentration camps; a student who, against all odds, served his country; and the altruism of the Shigemura family. Fred has presented his work around the country, with special presentations to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle.
My interview with Professor Hagstrom certainly didn’t cover all of what he’s done on campus to cultivate a publicly engaged environment; he’s been a long-time practitioner of public scholarship, whether expressly addressed as such or not. I only recently learned of Fred’s involvement as a director of the Learning and Teaching Center and his role as a new-faculty mentor. And although he will eventually empty those haphazard file cabinets in his studio, his dedication to art, teaching and publicly engaged scholarship will not easily be forgotten as his work continues to inspire book-viewers, faculty, and students around the world.
Fred Hagstrom’s works can be found in their permanent homes on campus in frames in the Libe, in the Gould Library’s Special Collections of Artist’s Books, in the Perlman Teaching Museum’s Collection, and in the aforementioned file cabinets in his offices in Boliou and Weitz (for now).