Sherri Strandberg recently opened her own salon and art gallery, Strand, in Bloomington, Illinois with the help of her husband, Kevin.
The vision for Strand was borne out of Sherri and Kevin’s life-long passion for art. Both are talented artists in their own right. Sherri is a hair stylist and jewelry designer. Kevin is a professor and the Director of the School of Art at Illinois Wesleyan, as well as a mixed media artist.
The opening of Strand coincided with First Friday’s in Bloomington. Sherri asked Angulr to exhibit during the event and throughout the month of October. Before the opening, Sherri and Kevin graciously spent some time to tell us more about their artistic inspirations and the process of putting together Strand.
Could you both tell me a little background about your relationship with art?
Kevin: You know, some people know they are going to be an artist forever. When I was about 7 or 8 years old I got my first folding knife and I have been carving and making sculptures ever since.
Sherri: My relationship to art was having a dad who was a woodworker and kind of lead by example. I, being the only daughter, was not allowed to use tools or a wood burning kit. But, growing up around someone who used his hands made me want to use mine. I started out initially as an art student, then as a hair stylist, and then I returned to school as an art student again. Then, of course, Kevin’s influence on my life. Watching him work kind of lead me to think that I might have that same burning desire.
Kevin: I drive Sherri crazy sometimes because if I’m not working on something, I am thinking about how I am going to make something. If it isn’t making art, it’s working on our building, which is a never-ending sculpture. Or, for many years I have been rebuilding old vintage Italian motorcycles. There is always something to do. I figure that if I have a constant assortment of jobs left undone, I can’t die. I’m going to always have something to finish.
Sherri, how does your background in art influence the way you approach hair styling?
Sherri: It’s interesting because hairdressing is geometry and it’s spatial relationships and it’s form. The medium, whether it’s gold or silver or whether it’s hair, it’s all the memory, the fabric, of how it moves. It’s very interrelated and I don’t think I was very conscious of that as a hairstylist until I found my medium as an art student. Which was funny to learn in a formal sense in a school environment and realize that I was practicing a lot of the elements of art in hairdressing. It truly is just another medium and another art form. I have a greater appreciation for it now, I think, because of school and that education.
Where do you draw your inspiration for the art you create?
Kevin: Oh, I had a pretty whacky childhood. It’s a rich resource of things. I don’t even know how to explain it but, it was a very strange childhood and I think about it all the time. My family didn’t have much money, so if we needed a bicycle, we would have to make one out of parts. Then later when I wanted a car I had to build one. I mean, that’s just the way it was.
Sherri: When I think about the things that make me want to make jewelry, it always comes down to a sort of cabinet of curiosities. Like those Joseph Cornell boxes with all their weird little interrelated objects that don’t seem like they should be related but then you see them in a collection in this box. I would always think that somehow those objects would have a talismanic or a lucky charm kind of power to them, that when you wear it you are protected, almost like a rosary. With hair, my goal is precision. How can I make it as clean and neat as the way I solder a link together on a chain? It is the same way I want to cut a section of the hair. The inspiration with hair would definitely be things like most hair stylists. When I see runway, I’m always wowed by that. I love all the James Bond women and the women in the Alfred Hitchcock movies. I think of the icons of hair from the 70’s, Ali McGraw, and the 80s, Madonna. I think of specific people and I can remember what their hair looked like when I saw an image of them in a magazine from 20 years ago.
Where did you draw your inspiration for the design of this space?
Sherri: With Kevin’s work we have been able to travel to so many great cities in this country and in Europe, specifically Barcelona, Spain. I think that a lot of the things in here are a product of a lot of the restaurants, boutiques, and cafes and things that we have seen while traveling. Plus, I like old things. I like that idea that things get more beautiful as they get more worn and patinaed. This is just a product of all my influences. All the places we visited when we travel and things that stuck in my mind that never left.
How do you choose pieces of art to display in your home and in your workspace?
Kevin: Well, artists swap all the time. So, most of the pieces that we have in our home, I’ve swapped somebody a piece for a piece. You have a visceral reaction to it. You like it a lot.
Sherri: I think Kevin is right, it’s visceral. It’s a gut level thing. It’s like when I looked at your work and I saw the pink and thought “that would look great in my bathroom.” I just knew immediately. Sorry, I know it’s the bathroom, but, it just had so much energy and dynamic. It was emotional. It was like a feeling. Whether it’s humor, or an uplifting feeling, it finds you. It’s like when you get an animal. You don’t pick it, it picks you.
Note: Kevin had to leave at this point to attend a meeting, so the interview continued with just Sherri.
So, how did you identify this space as the right space for your salon?
Sherri: I didn’t. It came to me, and when I saw it, it had goldenrod walls and brown shag carpet and wood paneling. But, the location, the view, and 576 sq ft…. It just had all the bones of the right kind of thing for someone going off on their own and working alone. Stylists tend to be in groups in salons so for me to find a space that was the right size for one person with the possibility for maybe one other person, it just had the right bones and the right location. And it was just off center enough and it was just an odd duck and that was just enough of a sign that it had what we needed.
You have described the interior of your salon as a collaboration between the two of you. can you tell me a little bit more about the two roles in bringing this place to life?
Sherri: Well, I pretty much had ideas about how I thought it should look but then when you put things together it surprises you when it actually works or doesn’t. I had my holy trinity of Kevin who was my contractor, my friend, Tim, who was my critical eye, and my graphic designer, Julie, who is an incredible critic and taste maker. I was so close to it, and often times so was Kevin by being the one building it, that I relied on those two external sources to kind of come in… and they would always say “you don’t need me. It looks great”, but they would often lend some kernel of inspiration that would always strike me as, I wouldn’t have known that. You need to keep some elements consistent or more neutral so the eye is drawn to other things that you want the attention to be drawn to. Kevin and I have a good process in that I would tell him what I was thinking and if he couldn’t envision it then I would have to show him visual guides. But, then I would say, “make sure it’s different.” Kevin was always good at improvising and finding ways to make things more personal and original.
You both create in multiple mediums, can you tell me a little bit about all the mediums you work in?
Sherri: With Kevin, he does mostly mixed media. His undergraduate work was in photography and film making. And his Masters, which is the terminal degree for a sculpture professor, was in sculpture. As a sculptor he was casting bronze and aluminum, but he also did a lot of woodworking. He will have everything from cast glass, cast bronze, to cast aluminum, and woodworking. He will use recycled materials along with manufactured or fabricated materials that he’s made, as well as incorporating a photograph. Currently he has been doing images where he uses powdered glass and he silkscreens photographic images onto glass. He is always finding ways to innovate and use all his different skill sets to make mixed media work. I just don’t know anybody like Kevin. He has sketchbooks and he will draw things and then he will revisit them and make something. He’s got pieces he started 20 years ago. Then he’ll what he calls “cannibalize” them and re-do them. He’s like a mad max. He’s just constantly… he is driven to make art.
I tend to strictly work in silver and gold. The finer the material the more of a luxury it is to work with. Hairstylists are usually masters of many different facets of styling from formal styling to perming hair… there are so many different skills in the umbrella of being a stylist, and I strictly cut and color. I figured out a long time ago that those were the two things that required the kind of precision that I was kind of excited about and engaged in. The other things, I truly believe I would be mediocre at. I’m such a perfectionist that mediocrity gives me so much anxiety. When I make something it is one of a kind and I don’t do multiples. I am only interested in the one time experience with the one time influence of whatever inspired me to make it in the first place, and that’s challenging in hair because trends mean that most people want a lot of the same thing. So I am always trying to figure out how to adjust it or make it personal to the one person.
Each of your jewelry pieces is one of a kind. how do you decide to create one of a kind pieces rather than prices that can be reproduced on a larger scale?
Sherri: Because I think people want to feel special. Because I don’t want to see the person next to me wearing the same thing. I think it goes back to that idea about things being heirloom or talismanic. The idea that only one was made and it is going to outlive me.
I have made pieces where I’ve done a variation on a theme, where I have tried to do a series. I have never quite felt successful at it because I don’t know that I can make them cohesive but different enough that the person wearing it might not feel like, “Oh if I wear that, and that other person I know bought a piece from that series, are we going to look like we are wearing the same piece?”.
I feel like you’ve both mentioned a few times that you see this place and your home as a like a really large sculpture. Where do you think that idea comes from?
Sherri: Poverty. Not being able to afford to hire architects and artists. I would love to have a graffiti artist come in and do a big mural on our wall. The police have asked us not to do that but we would love to have that. Since we can’t live where we would like to live, we are going to create that kind of place in our own work and living environments. Then, of course, being economically hamstrung, you find ways to make what you couldn’t go into Jonathan Adler and Design Within Reach stores and just pluck up and buy. Trying to create a lifestyle and an environment that reminds us of the places that we wish somehow at a different point in our lives we could be.
Don’t you think? I mean you’re in Manhattan. All this money, all this design, all these great places.
Lauren: I feel like… that’s a little limiting… because then I can just go out and buy something brand new. And that’s much easier than taking the time to go find something really special.
Sherri: So maybe necessity. I mean if you really want something unusual around here, you gotta look for it. We’ve been to a farm about an hour and a half away from here and the guy’s business is literally when a tornado comes through, he rushes to the farm, throws down a lot of money to the farmer and says “I will deconstruct your barn and get it off your property. And he has piles of beautiful barn wood. Which is what my planter is out front. We constructed that from a barn that just got destroyed in a tornado in Sullivan, Illinois about 3 months ago. And now it’s already repurposed for my planter. When I was seeking out old barber stations and apothecary furniture, we had to go to Callahan's in Chillicothe, Illinois. This teeny tiny place where this guy pulls out old bars from old buildings that are about to be raised and then he sells them.
Lauren: I feel like that is what makes things like that really special when they are here. Because I feel like, in general, people have the idea that anything cool or anything in the art world is all happening in larger cities. But there are all these people here that are doing such amazing things and I feel like it makes it easier to kind of pick them out because it’s not as saturated with people.
Sherri: If only this community realized that more and supported it more. I think because we are in the heartland and we have these universities and these kind of conservative, white collar businesses – which I am thankful for because they keep our town economically stable – they also bring a contingent of pretty conservative, midwestern-valued, good people. I think anyone who makes art knows that art usually has to have some element of, not controversy, but… it usually does not draw that audience. It can, but I don’t know why there is that disparity of this economic stability and this influx of artists here, according to Doug Johnson. Yet, if you ask any artist here, this town doesn’t really support the art like we wish it would or could. It’s strange that Manhattanites might find the kind of art here very curious and interesting because it is so from a genuine or pure place. But that the people here, being in a small town, would look to the big cities in just the opposite way, that it is where the real art is happening.