The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) celebrates its hundredth birthday this year with a number of larger-than-life pieces of art, which aim to “bring artwork out to the public in ways that are unexpected,” according to Michelle Courtright, president of Made, the agency behind all of the birthday surprises for the MIA.
Made specializes in everything to do with physical and tangible branding, and over the last year, it has rolled out a number of projects to celebrate the MIA (including a dragon ice sculpture, crop art, and giant replicas of works of art).
But the wraps applied to three Minnesota water towers in May might be the biggest birthday surprise of all—in size and in the amount of project management it took to get the job done.
The wraps feature three different works of art: The water tower in New Hope is wrapped with Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa; the Minnetonka water tower displays Frank Stella’s Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II; and Vincent van Gogh’s Olive Trees is on the Chisago City tower.
The artworks were chosen by the MIA based on the quality and resolution of the files.
“They were taking photographs or using existing photographs, and they wanted to find the best way to get something that could fit this weird shape—these flat-facing water towers,” says Courtright. “So they really were put into a box about the dimensions and what would look best.”
Made and the MIA also worked with printing company Vomela on the prepress and printing requirements to make sure the files could scale to the size needed.
“We needed to make sure they gave us the right thing or something that we could work with,” explains Dave Peterson, director of Sales and Trade Development at Vomela.
With the files in hand, Vomela printed the graphics with its EFI VUTEk GS5000r printer on 2-mil, non-PVC 3M™ Envision™ Print Wrap Film 480Cv3 coupled with the 3M™ Envision™ Luster Wrap Overlaminate 8549L. The graphics were output in fifty-four-inch-wide panels, and all of the printing took several hours to complete.
(Note: Under the Wave off Kanagawa on the New Hope tower was printed twice and installed as a double image because the original file was too short to fit the tower.)
Vomela continued to help on the project management side, even after the printing was finished, by helping the job move along and making sure the installers knew how to use the vinyl film products.
Finding an installer who could handle this unique, high-rise project proved to be one of the biggest challenges on the job. Made was turned down by many installers because the project was too high and too dangerous.
Through a bit of luck and good timing, That’s A Wrap, a sign and wrap installation company in Nashville, Tennessee, saw a post looking for installers on the Facebook group, “The Wrap Society.” That’s A Wrap reached out to Made, agreed to do the install, and was flown out to Minnesota.
Jeremiah Breitigan, owner of That’s A Wrap, opened the shop in January 2013 after spending most of his life in the sign industry—starting from weeding vinyl at the age of nine. The shop handles installations of all kinds—from ADA signs and post-and-panels to luxury car wraps and even water towers! (Note: That’s A Wrap also has a location in Las Vegas, Nevada.)
Despite all of Breitigan’s experience, however, the water tower installs proved difficult for something completely out of his control—the weather.
Days of pouring rain forced Breitigan and his fellow installer Brandan Bauman to wait out the weather in their hotel room—setting them back on their schedule. When the two installers did make it to the job site, the soft ground proved problematic for their service equipment.
“The towers were 135 feet to 150 feet high. We had a 180-foot Genie lift, so that we weren’t fully extended and could get to those heights comfortably,” says Breitigan. “The only problem was the weight of the lift left sink holes wherever it was parked and made it unlevel, so it locked up numerous times while we were 150 feet in the air.
“Service trucks came out to try and fix how fragile the sensors were on the lift.”
Even without the problem of the rain-soaked ground, the terrain around the towers was difficult to set up on.
“They had to get the base of it level, which is sometimes challenging because the terrain around the water towers are all different—some were on a slope, etc,” says Courtright. “They really had to find the right angle to even get the machine to work up at those levels. It was a challenging one.”
Aside from the weather, other hurdles to installation included the surfaces of the water towers themselves, which had to be prepped before installation.
“The Chisago water tower was freshly painted around the logos that are forty-five feet in length, so we were able to apply after a light alcohol cleaning,” says Breitigan. “The other fifteen feet we needed to complete the full graphic was oxidized and rusted, which we tried scrubbing to get the graphic to stick but had no luck.”
Ultimately, to get the graphics to stay, That’s A Wrap reheated and sealed the edges of the print.
On the New Hope tower, oxidation was a problem.
“[Made] had a company come out a week earlier to wash it, but they were only able to get the dirt off and not the oxidation,” says Breitigan. “Oxidation took us a lot of scrubbing and a lot of alcohol to prep it enough to hold the graphic.”
The Minnetonka tower provided a third issue—condensation. Wheras the water was low enough in the other two water towers for condensation to be a non-issue, this particular tower was half full.
Installers got around this problem by installing on a dry day and waiting to start until after the morning dew had already formed. They then dried the tower with a torch. (Note: Due to the inevitable delays in installation, That’s A Wrap had to return to Nashville to handle other jobs, and another company performed this last install.)
In total, all three towers took about two weeks to finish with all the delays. Made plans to take down the graphics sometime this month.
Since the wraps have been up, Made and the MIA have gotten a lot of feedback, including 800 “likes” in the first hour the project was announced on Facebook. Many people from the community have also shared their opinions on what the wraps mean to them.
“Hearing people speak about it and how they felt about it was great,” says Courtright. “It just speaks to the MIA and their ability to connect with the community.
“People were really excited to support it.”
By Ashley Bray
All photos: That’s A Wrap
