@tommylundberg. Tommy Lundberg | Courtesy
When “Wild Bill” Lundberg chats about his three kids and their talents, it’s easy to guess they inherited athleticism from their dad, the face of Charger athletics.
Steven, Kate, and Tommy Lundberg grew up a sporty bunch, but they also inherited a lesser-known talent from their father, Hayden Park Fitness Director Bill Lundberg: his gift for art. Now, Kate and Tommy work as professional artists.
“My kids’ talents have far surpassed mine,” Lundberg said. “They got their gifts from their grandmothers, actually, and from the Lord.”
Kate Lundberg ’11 intertwines fabrics, metals, papers galore at Anthropologie’s Philadelphia headquarters to create decor for each season. Tommy Lundberg ’14 finds unexpected angles and aims his camera at exotic colors as he makes creative content for corporate Instagram accounts like Lollapalooza and the Hawaii Tourism Board.
Many years before his children decided to pursue art, Bill Lundberg likewise adjusted his education’s trajectory. He studied at a junior college in Michigan and completed two years of pre-professional work in architecture while establishing himself as a runner.
When he transferred to the University of Kansas and entered its school of architecture and design, however, he said he felt compelled to change his path.
“I was just seeking God — ‘Where do you want me to go? What do you want me to do with my life?’” Bill Lundberg said. “I really felt like I wanted to teach and coach.”
As he started his second year in Kansas, Bill Lundberg changed his major to art education. He went straight into coaching track, and later got his master’s degree in physiology, exercise physiology, and kinesiology. But he still draws cartoons on the whiteboards of his classrooms to lighten the atmosphere in Physical Wellness Dynamics classes.
After Kate Lundberg, 30, graduated in 2011, Anthropologie hired her to create store displays for one of its shops in Atlanta. The enterprise has modeled itself after its five muses, which, according to its website, are “soft and delicate; boho chic; easy cool; elegant classic; and modern sporty.”
Anthropologie’s creativity and definitive style resonated with the young college graduate.
“It was this job where I was going to have to use every single skill set that I had learned from college and a lot more, a lot of things I had never ventured to use before,” Kate Lundberg said.
She has worked as a display manager at the Anthropologie headquarters, its home office, in Philadelphia for the last two years.
Even though she set goals to advance within the company soon after she started at Anthropologie, she hadn’t always dreamed of working as an artist and designer. Kate Lundberg said she started college intending to study comparative literature as an English major. She also wanted to walk onto the volleyball team as a sophomore, but the athletic commitments precluded her other endeavors.
“I let go of that dream and decided to focus on art,” Kate Lundberg said.
Once she switched, her courses enriched her more deeply than her English classes ever had.
“There was just something so enjoyable to me about being in the Sage Center and walking into Sam Knecht’s or Barbara Bushey’s art classes,” Kate Lundberg said. “You go into that classroom, the lights dim, you’re looking at that slideshow. It’s this really cool, serene, intimate classroom experience where you get to hear about art and artists I was so inspired by in the past.”
She spent an extra year at Hillsdale, completing her art major and exploring all the mediums she could, which prepared her for working at Anthropologie. At the store, she used newspapers to construct a life-sized elephant skeleton. She worked with beets, red onion, and turmeric to dye fabrics with natural colors.
“My job really just was this extension of an art education that was really exciting to me, and really fulfilling in those first few years out of college,” Kate Lundberg said. “I did know deep down that I wanted more, and I wanted to see how far I could get with this company.”
At her corporate job at Home Office, she helps create and assemble display packages, a kind of kit sent to every Anthropologie store to help its artists create the decor each season demands.
“I get to work with so many creative, amazing individuals, so that definitely keeps me on my toes,” Kate Lundberg said. “I’m very grateful for this job, and I may be seeing it through for a while longer.”
In the long-term, however, she said she will consider getting a master’s in Fine Arts. The possibility of teaching also excites her, but for now, she will continue to focus on her personal art. In the last year and a half, she has displayed her own creations in five different venues, including the Art Alumni Invitational Exhibit showcased homecoming weekend.
Kate Lundberg knows she’ll keep pushing herself — that’s just her personality. But that’s also her encouragement to all young artists, especially those at Hillsdale embarking on the same quest she chose seven years ago: “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” she said. “As an art major, you have an amazing skill set to offer, and it’s just about how you apply that. Speak it into the world that you want something, and go for it.”
Tommy Lundberg, 27, must have taken his sister’s advice. He discovered his passion for Instagram when he started snapping photos on his iPhone in his free time after work as an in-house designer for a Whole Foods Market store in Los Angeles.
He set his prospects high, quit his job, and undertook a new venture: working as a professional Instagrammer. He never thought his artistic inspiration would take this turn.
As he started his sophomore year at Hillsdale, Tommy Lundberg tried to pull ahead in his runs with his team as well as in the classroom. He hung up his running gear when a few injuries slowed him down after an intense summer of training, and he eventually pushed aside his work as an economics major, too.
“I realized, ‘I’m not eating and breathing this stuff like my peers. This is what they love, and on their free time they’re learning it, and they’re absorbing it so much better,’” Tommy Lundberg said. “I had kind of an identity crisis in the academic world too. I had to go through those experiences and some struggles and failures to realize that I really love art.”
So he switched his major to art, and the shift illumined him: “That’s when the light went on for me, and I really got into the creative process,” he said.
Under the direction of art professors Sam Knecht and Brian Springer, Tommy Lundberg’s art proliferated. He dug into art outside of class, too, and rendered everything that delighted his eye and his mind with his own artistic vision.
While he prepared to graduate, he found a job opening at Whole Foods Market that would allow him to design and draw signs and other pieces of art for their store. He got the job, moved out to L.A., and started taking photos after work to keep up the creative process he established in college.
“That kind of birthed this passion or interest in photography. It really started to switch spring of last year. I started getting invited to these InstaMeet things with some photographers that I really admired,” Tommy Lundberg said. “I got into a place where my feed started to become very artistic. Clearly, it was something that I wasn’t just casually doing.”
Since he purchased a professional-grade camera last August, he’s shot all over the United States, and he’s even started breaking into the international scene. He photographed hipsters dancing at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, Firefly Festival in Delaware, Arroyo Seco Weekend in Pasadena, California, and Lollapalooza Chicago with Red Bull. He’s been to Hawaii with the Hawaii Tourism Board, Shanghai, China, with W Hotels Worldwide, and in just a couple days, he leaves for Japan to make content for another tourism project.
“I’m a new breed of photographer. I’m really just an instagramer. I’m a professional instagramer. People are hiring me to create content for them,” Tommy Lundberg said.
Tommy Lundberg and Kate Lundberg speak passionately about their developing careers, but no one takes more pride in their work than their father. He credits Hillsdale College with his kids’ success.
“Hey, look — it’s not the starving artist thing. These kids they are really, if not just rockin’ it, they’re doing well in their careers,” Bill Lundberg said. “And that’s a credit to our art department here and our professors.”
