Saturday, April 15, 2023
Lecture with the artist 11 am
Sinew workshop 12-4 pm

Kodiak artist Coral Chernoff (Alutiiq, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine) will talk about her career harvesting, processing, and creating art from natural and handmade materials. Chernoff works in many mediums, including ivory and wood carving, basket weaving, birch bark basketry, and fish skin and gut sewing. 

Following the lecture, learn how to make thread and cordage from animal sinew in a free workshop. Materials will be provided, but participants are welcome to bring their own sinew to get processing advice. Chernoff will also bring processed samples of other natural materials from her vast materials library. This workshop is best suited for adults. Advance registration not required.

The lecture and workshop are part of a program series accompanying Visceral: Verity, Legacy, Identity - Alaska Native Gut Knowledge and Perseverance.

March 3-October 9, 2023  

Visceral: Verity is a new exhibition of work by contemporary artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs. Kelliher-Combs’ mixed-media installations combine natural and synthetic materials and evoke questions of authentic experience, truth, abuse, transparency, and credibility. She is one of only a few artists working with marine mammal gut.

Kelliher-Combs returns to the museum for the first time since her powerful 2001 solo exhibition, bringing the richness of her experience growing up in Nome, her career as an internationally recognized artist, her life in Anchorage, and her insights as a person of Inupiaq, Athabascan, and European heritage.

Visceral: Verity is the first in a series of three interrelated exhibitions opening at the State Museum. The Visceral trilogy is co-curated by Kelliher-Combs and explores contemporary and historical Alaska Native issues, spotlighting gut as a material used to express Indigenous voices.

Visceral: Legacy and Visceral: Identity open in May.

Image: Idiot Strings, Credible. Printed fabric, nylon thread, wool, steel wire. Sonya Kelliher-Combs 2022.

February 3 - April 9, 2023
Alaska State Museum

Using found and recycled objects combined with hand-drawn and sculpted elements, Jannah Sexton Atkins assembles works that contemplate society’s connection to nature.

The Marker Series chronicles "humanity’s impact on Earth’s complex natural ecosystems by exponentially disrupting the elegant inter-relational web of organic life forms and their natural sustainable habitat critical for life itself.”

Each of the 20 Prayer Markers in the exhibition includes a portrait of an insect, bird, fish or plant. Sexton Atkins playfully combines these portraits with salvaged, societal waste. The resulting Markers encourage connection and responsibility to our planet.

Image credit: Jannah Sexton Atkins, Prayer Marker - Artifacts of Pollinator Networks, mixed media assemblage, found objects.  

January 14 - April 22, 2023
Sheldon Jackson Museum

Filling Empty Spaces – Attraction and Distraction is an exhibition of new works by Robert Hoffmann.

Through his carvings and paintings, Robert Hoffmann (Tlingit) explores cultural values and to what ends they drive us in a search for fulfillment.

Image credit: Introspection by Robert Hoffmann