Pictured with the band members and conductor raised up at the end with the telling of the atom bomb use in WWII — leaving only a solo musician playing taps.
Pictured with the Band seated and a conductor.
“The Million Dollar Band” is mobile performance artwork created for presentation at street fairs — telling the true story of a World War I Army Band from North Dakota, and reporting the fact that we allocate more funds for military bands than for all of the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1980s, even more true today. Its inspiration was the Nuclear Freeze Movement, a protest of the Reagan era arms build-up.
The show had a successful life on the street throughout the Pacific Northwest and was often invited inside to play, once at the Veterans Hospital in Seattle, in a Nordstrom store window as part of a downtown arts fair! Its final performances were included in a 1990 art exhibit titled, “Sound Vision” at the Center on Contemporary Art [CoCA] in Seattle — when it was reported that marching bands were indeed included in the war against Iraq and that we were still spending more on military music than for all of the programs funded by the NEA!
THE MILLION DOLLAR BAND, 1983-2020
24″w x 48″h x 24″d, polymer clay figures, wire, fish line, wooden case
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Having failed to either sell or donate this artwork it was destroyed, March 9, 2020.
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