Vital 5 Productions was a "one-man arts organization" for which Lundgren won a Genius Award in 2003.[5][6][7] The program created exhibits, publications and issued grants.[8] In 2007, it was the subject of an eight-week 911 Media Arts Center retrospective called "Straight to Video: the first 10 years of Vital 5".[9][10]
Lundgren wrote The Vital 5 Cookbook, published in 2006, as a set of "recipes" for exhibition and self-expression.[11] The title may have been a reference to The Anarchist Cookbook.[6]
Lundgren started Vital 5's Arbitrary Art Grants program in 2009, issuing $500 grants to local artists to "serve as catalysts to create large-scale group projects and performances".[12]
In 2015, Vital 5 Productions retrofitted the 3rd floor of the historic King Street Station in downtown Seattle for contemporary art exhibition. This 22,000 square foot space hosted Out of Sight - a survey of contemporary art in the Pacific Northwest concurrent with the Seattle Art Fair. Giant Steps - a 48 Hour Artist Residency on the Moon, a group exhibition and competition, opened in the space on March 3, 2016. The second year of Out of Sight will launch on August 4, 2016.
Lundgren Monuments
His funeral monument business, Lundgren Monuments, opened in 2004,[1] and he opened a "death boutique" showroom on Seattle's First Hill in 2008 including work by other artists such as Jesse Edwards and Michael Leavitt.[13] Lundgren has been noted for "bring[ing] more art and design into the world" of death care,[14] and creating "a renaissance in the funerary arts in 21st-century America".[7]
Lundgren Monuments specializes in large-scale cast glass monuments with the intent of bringing more color, light and diversity into the cemetery landscape. They also design and build modern urns and host group exhibitions focused on contemporary design and alternatives to traditional death care.
An exhibit at Lundgren Monuments in 2010 was called "the first time in history that a group of architects have focused their talents on the cremation urn as an architectural object".[15][16]
Lundgren, along with mortician and author Caitlin Doughty, TED speaker Jae Rhim Lee, alternative funeral home director Jeff Jorgenson, and other death professionals, founded The Order of the Good Death, promoting alternative death care and putting Seattle in the forefront of this new endeavor.[19][20][21][22]
Lundgren's feature length one-take film CHAT, starring Rosalie Edholm as a camgirlsex worker, was screened at the Northwest Film Forum in July, 2014, and again in September for Seattle's Local Sightings Film Festival.[23][24]
^"Modern Homes for the Dead", Funeral Business Advisor, September 8, 2014, Greg Lundgren has been designing and championing high craft, modern urns, and brought some of the leading 21st century architects and designers into the conversation. Architects like Tom Kundig, Lorcan O'Herlihy, George Suyama and Eric Kahn. Designers such as Stefan Gulassa, Mark Mitchell and Arne Pihl. This conversation is very much alive and changing the way we consider our last home. Do the people you love reside in cardboard boxes? Lundgren Monuments believes that with death comes the opportunity to bring more art and design into the world, that monuments and urns help define our cultural heritage, and at present, we are failing in our approach to death and the legacies we leave behind.
^
Samantha Brooks (May 15, 2013), "Urn Style", Robb Report Home & Style, Easily mistaken for a purely decorative object, the Final Turn is actually an urn. The Seattle-based architect Tom Kundig, of Olson Kundig Architects, created the piece with the designer Greg Lundgren, of Seattle's Lundgren Monuments ...