Community members commemorate the flood through sandbag art

Zach Logsden said he will always remember the 2008 summer floods.

Two years later and older, the ten-year-old boy thinks back to a hot summer day he spent scooping mounds of sand into bags, hoping to protect Iowa City's Java House bakery, from rising waters.

“It felt good knowing that I could help out,” he said.

Logsden and hundreds of other community members shared their flood experience in the form of a hand decorated flat, sandbag that was then donated to the Sandbag Project, a community artwork initiative designed to commemorate the 2008 floods.

Sandbags that formally acted as shields against high waters now hang together as a banner, surrounded by photographs of the actual flood in both the Iowa City Public Library and Johnson County Historical Society. Each bag displays the individual creators own flood memories, through drawings, photos or text.

Lauren Ross, the artist and facilitator of the project, said the idea for the banner came from sandbagging itself and how that process brought people together during the floods.

“I wanted it to do something that celebrates the community, and banners are celebratory,” the 25-year-old said. “The more I thought about the project the more I wanted to do something that brought people together, something they could participate in.”

Ross, an Iowa City native, said the first sandbags for the project were made by 15 kids from the surrounding area enrolled at Camp Noah, a program that helped children severely impacted by the flood recover.

The project grew from there.

Ross than contacted the Iowa City Public Library, seeking their help in expanding the project. Ross worked with Kara Logsden, the adult services coordinator, who helped Ross distribute and collect more sandbags.

Logsden said Ross wanted to give community members an outlet to express their feelings about the flood , but through art.

“We thought it would be nice to have a display that marks some of the things that happened, maybe a little bit of a personal side,” she said. “We also wanted to celebrate the community and the amount accomplished in the last two years.”

As an Iowa City resident herself, both Kara Logsden and her son Zach Logsden designed their own sandbags to share their flood stories.

The pair said their family volunteered and helped sandbag during the flood. Kara Logsden said she also worked for the city flood control hot-line, dispatching volunteers and supplies.

“It's pretty awesome to see it [the banner] hung,” she said. “This is something that helps us celebrate out community and the people that came together and really made a remarkable difference.”

Even after the two displays were put together the Sandbag project continued to expand, providing more opportunities for the community to contribute.

Ross, with the help of the library, provided an opportunity to create and donate more bags at the Iowa City Arts Festival.

“I was shocked at the response,” she said. “We had to shut down early because we ran out of sandbags.”

Ross, who is a graduate student at The Art Institute of Chicago, said she started thinking about the project in the spring of 2009, but noted it still isn't complete.

In August, Ross said she hopes to meet her goal and finish the project by combining the two displays and the abundance of bags from the Art Festival and string them into one large banner and then hang it across one of the formally flooded pedestrian bridges.