UPCOMING EXHIBITS & EVENTS
 Raktenga Elaine Kingeekuk demonstrating about gut. Photo by Jackie Hrabok.
Raktenga Elaine Kingeekuk Lecture
Friday, June 26, noon
APK Lecture Hall
Raktenga Elaine Kingeekuk will give a public presentation about her cultural and artistic experiences this Friday. Ms. Kingeekuk is a St. Lawrence Island Yupik culture bearer and co-author of the book Seal, Thimble & Sinew Thread: Sewing Art of the Siberian Yupiks from Savoonga, Alaska.
She is in Juneau courtesy of the Access to Alaska Native Collections grant funded by the CIRI Foundation and administered by Museums Alaska. At the Alaska State Museum, she will be studying items in the collection, viewing the exhibition Visceral: Verity, Legacy, Identity, and researching gut with conservator Ellen Carrlee.
Ms. Kingeekuk has collaborated with institutions such as the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center and the Cordova Museum to repair gut parks for exhibition. She hopes to connect broadly with various entities in Juneau to enhance her artistic and teaching practices making dolls, gut baskets, toddler regalia, and jewelry from customary St. Lawrence Island Yupik materials.
Where the Far North Meets the Southwest
Tuesday, July 18, noon
APK Lecture Hall
Dr. Alex Hunt, Director of the Center for the Study of the American West and West Texas A&M’s Vincent/Haley Professor of Western Studies, will give a guest lecture on Western American studies, climate work, and the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko. Silko is a writer of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and white descent who has published several novels and books of poetry and was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant. She lived in Ketchikan and spent time in Bethel. Hunt will focus on Alaska's prominence in her work.
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July Native Artist-in-Residence is Neva Mathias
July 10-28
Sheldon Jackson Museum
The Sheldon Jackson Museum is pleased to welcome Cup’ik artist-in-residence Neva Mathias. Mathias is a doll and basket maker from Chevak, Alaska.
Mathias will teach a grass basket making class and hold two artist talks. View July calendar.
Beginning Grass Basket Making Class
July 13-14 and July 20-21, 9:30 am–12 pm, 2-4 pm
Space is limited to 8 students, ages 17+. The class is free but a $25 fee will go toward basket-making materials (provided).
To register for the class or learn more, call the museum at (907) 747-8981.
Artist Talks
July 21 & 27, 2-3 pm
Image: Cup'ik grass baskets by Neva Mathias
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Alaska State Museum
through October 2023
Three interrelated exhibitions co-curated by artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs explore contemporary and historical Alaska Native issues and spotlight gut as a conduit for Indigenous voices.
Visceral: Verity, a new exhibition of work by contemporary artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs, includes mixed-media installations that combine natural and synthetic materials and evoke questions of authentic experience, truth, abuse, transparency, and credibility. Kelliher-Combs is one of only a few artists working with marine mammal gut. She brings to her art 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 Iñupiaq, Athabascan, and European heritage.
Visceral: Legacy expands Kelliher-Combs’s solo exhibition themes through a selection of objects from the museum’s permanent collection.
Visceral: Identity features gut parkas from across Alaska to highlight technical and historical aspects of this remarkable material in cross-cultural perspective.
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Fridays, noon-1 pm, online
Story hours for kids are great but why should they get all the fun?
Currently reading Good Company: a Mining Family in Fairbanks, Alaska
From the book jacket: Good Company is a vivid and compelling story of life in early twentieth-century Alaska. During the lean years of the depression through World War II and Vietnam, Sarah Isto's family made a home in "company housing" in the small mining town of Fairbanks. With a wry sense of humor and an eye for detail, Isto tells of the courtship and marriage of her parents and her own Fairbanks childhood, weaving rich descriptions of daily life and northern living into her story. Good Company celebrates the joys and challenges of family life on the Alaska frontier.
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FEATURED RESOURCE
The Alaska State Library has created a guide to finding articles in historic Alaska newspapers. We’ve combined coverage from printed indexes with historic Alaska newspapers we've digitized and made searchable through Chronicling America.
Between the digitized newspapers in Chronicling America and print indexes located in the Alaska State Library and sometimes other communities, indexing or full-text searching is available for the following communities: Anchorage, Adak, Chitina, Cordova, Dillingham, Douglas, Eagle, Fairbanks, Glennallen, Haines, Homer, Hot Springs, Hydaburg, Hyder, Iditarod, Juneau, Ketchikan, Kenai, Kennecott (aka Kennicott), Kodiak, Knik, McCarthy, McGrath, Moose Pass, Nenana, Nome, Palmer, Petersburg, Rampart, Seldovia, Seward, Sitka, Skagway, Tanana, Unalakleet, Valdez, Wales, Wasilla, and Wrangell.
Time coverage varies greatly by town but, in most places, favors the first part of the 20th century. Subject coverage also varies.
The guide is also available through SLED’s history page under Research Resources and under Primary Sources. Feedback about this resource is welcome and can be sent to daniel.cornwall@alaska.gov.
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