Augsburg Associate Professor and 3D Specialist, Robert K Tom, has taught three-dimensional studio art and design since 2002. He is the designer of the award sculptures for the Diversity Awards, which will be presented at The Forum’s 35th Annual Conference. He designed glass sculptures with double helix patterns that look different from every angle— a symbolic representation of intersectionality. Diversity Awards will be given to individuals and organizations whose DEI work in the community impressed The Forum. The categories awarded are: Power the Future, Winds of Change (Individual and Organization), and Friend of The Forum.
Robert Tom was born in Hawaii to Chinese and Hawaiian parents and his background influences his art at the intersections of Eastern, Western, and Indigenous cultures. He notes how key moments in his life shaped his creative vision as an environmentally conscious artist and as an educator. “There are pivotal points in your life that set a marker in your psyche that you’re good at something.” He recently discovered his kindergarten report card in his parents home, which had had silver stars for all the other subjects and gold stars for art and math He didn’t know at a young age that art would be a career, but he firmly believes it was that report card that helped him identify that art and math were his key areas of strength.
Another pivotal moment for the artist came in the form of a lesson. There is a deceptively unassuming glass jar in his studio that is filled with soil, sticks, and cigarette butts that he collected from an ashtray in the designated smokers’ area on campus. This creation resonates with a powerful environmental message demonstrated by Tom’s seventh-grade science teacher. “He had these goldfish, and at the beginning of class, the teacher broke one cigarette in half and dropped into the fish tank, and within 15 minutes, the goldfish were sucking for air and dying.” Hopefully those poor goldfish survived, but now, when Tom sees cigarette butts on the ground or people smoking in their cars, he thinks about the ultimate result: “It is going into the streams and in the rivers.”
His work before coming to Augsburg was environmentally, socially, and politically conscious in a general sense, but it wasn’t targeting a single community. “When I first started teaching here, I felt that there was an invisible line separating The Cedar-Riverside Community and Augsburg campus.” It is a neighborhood with a predominantly Somali and Oromo immigrant population that has settled there since the early 1990s. Tom talked to his mentor about the cultural barrier he was witnessing and his mentor asked him, “What would you like to do about it?” So Tom reached out to one of Augsburg’s art teachers and extended an invitation to the university’s students. This initiative led to a multi-year after-school project in which third, fourth, and fifth graders in the neighborhood were welcomed into Tom’s studio to make what he calls “a multicultural contemporary religious iconography” bass relief. The kids brought important cultural objects that they pressed into clay to make a mold. Tom found it especially gratifying when one of the young students who took part in this project came back to campus as Augsburg freshman eight years later. Tom’s innovative program is proof that combining forces with the environment around you can build bridges between cultures. His sculptures celebrate the diversity of his life’s work. What a perfect way to acknowledge our appreciation for this year’s Diversity Award winners.
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More about Robert K Tom: Bio
More about our guest journalist: Khadijo (Jojo) Abdi is a writer, poet, and educator living in Minneapolis, MN. Her poetry and essays are published in Lyricality, Minnesota Women’s Press, and in the anthology by Freedom Voices, Muslim American Writers At Home: Stories, Essays, and Poems of Diversity and Belonging.