As part of the Alaska Native Artist Residency Program, Koyukon-Athabascan artist Selina Alexander will share her art through several events over the next few days. Alexander’s work focuses on caribou tufting, beading, and porcupine quillwork. Alexander and museum curator Jackie Fernandez-Hamberg joined KCAW’s Brooke Schafer to discuss upcoming events and Alexander’s artistic evolution — including her first ever art project, a Barbie doll outfit made of mink and muskrat. Listen to the full interview here:
Alaska Positive 2023 Now in its 53rd year, Alaska Positive continues to encourage photography as an art form in Alaska.
Alaska Positive opens at the Alaska State Museum on December 1, 2023 and runs through March 9, 2024. The exhibition will then travel to museums throughout Alaska.
The call for submissions closes October 13, 2023 at 9:59 p.m. Alaska Time.
Winter Lecture/Culture Share Series The Friends of Sheldon Jackson Museum are seeking proposals for the 2023/2024 Winter Lecture/Culture Share Series. Speakers are invited to propose a 30-45 minute Zoom presentation in one of six categories. Applications are due October 20.
Join us to learn how your OCLC subscriptions work together to help your library strengthen information services for all Alaskans.
During this 45-minute session, you will learn about:
How this program supports the goals of Alaska libraries
Specific products and services included
The value of central, shared data in WorldCat
Support options and resources
There will be time for questions at the end, as well as links to additional resources and next steps for libraries looking to really take advantage of this valuable, unique relationship with the Alaska Library Network.
If you have a conflict and you can’t attend the webinar, please register so you can receive the event recording to view at your convenience. It's a great professional development opportunity for anyone on your staff.
Join the Friends of the Homer Public Library and Alaskan author John Messick as we discuss his new book, Compass Lines: Journeys Toward Home.
From Antarctica to the Arctic, the Florida swamps to a Cambodia tattoo parlor, a Middle East bicycle route to a Yukon River canoe trip, Compass Lines brings readers on adventures that traverse latitudes and continents in pursuit of that most elusive place: home.
“If it wasn’t for the erosion, we never would have found it,” said Rick Knecht, a professor of archaeology at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen who’s guided the project since its earliest days.
Three miles outside the community of Quinhagak in Southwest Alaska, Knecht walked through the landfill toward the dig site. The footpath winds past piles of junked cars, and over marshy tundra with the texture of a wet sponge, toward a mud pit.
Here, on the shores of Kuskokwim Bay, is the richest record of Yup’ik life prior to contact with Russian sailors yet unearthed for study and preservation. Each summer Knecht and a team of volunteers come from around the globe to salvage relics preserved in the ground as fast as they reasonably can.
For the better part of this year, our newsroom [KTOO] has been working on a podcast series about the Filipino experience in Juneau. We’re very excited to share it with you.
Mga Kuwento — “the stories” in Tagalog — is the brainchild of Executive Producer Tasha Elizarde. Tasha grew up in Juneau and spent a lot of time thinking about her own experience as a Filipino American in Juneau when she started working with us as a community engagement fellow. In order to tell that story and the larger story of how Filipinos came to be Juneau’s largest immigrant population, she conceived not only a podcast series, but an exhibit at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum recognizing the history and contributions of a community that is too often overlooked and a community event bringing Juneau together to celebrate.
The Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly received a top-down review of how the borough library system selects books and materials during a Thursday work session.
The review was requested by Assemblymember Tammie Wilson over the past few weeks based on feedback from community members and her own experience, she said.
Jack Barnwell, September 24, 2023. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
The Alutiiq Museum and Kodiak History Museum are joining forces for an October lecture series. It’s an opportunity for the Kodiak community to learn about recent historical and scientific work in the region.
“We want to offer people a chance to see some of the historical and field research that’s been going on around Kodiak and also give the researchers a chance to share their findings,” Kodiak History Museum Curator Lynn Walker told KDM.
It’s also a chance for the two museums to collaborate.
Steve Williams, October 2, 2023. Kodiak Daily Mirror.
One upcoming event will stream over Zoom:
Pottery in the Kodiak Archipelago Lecture October 27, noon on Zoom
Elizabeth Groat, Utah State University
The pottery of Kodiak [Island] is shrouded in mystery. It was made for just a few hundred years, from around 1550 to contact, and it’s only been found in the south and east of the archipelago. For the past year, I have been studying this pottery by examining specimens held in Alutiiq Museum collections, running lab analyses and attempting my own experimental reconstructions. In my presentation, I will share what I’ve learned about what traditional Alutiiq pottery looked like and how it was made, as well as some preliminary thoughts about what it was used for.
Ever wondered about the story behind the person next to you? What their “story” is? Everyone has a story as unique as people are, and have a story waiting to be discovered.
On Thursday, the Glenn Massay Theater at Mat-Su College will be hosting a much different “book” experience than the typical book fair or library book sale, as it opens its doors to the Human Library.
Katie Stavick, October 2, 2023. Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman.
The Chena Tool Library is expanding and can now help Fairbanksans in areas of food security, like gardening, processing meat, even beekeeping.
This is a lending library of sorts. But instead of books, residents can check out tools that help with a variety of projects. The organization lends tools for do-it-yourself projects.
"We've received a grant in support of local food security, which we're using to purchase tools to help in planting, growing, harvesting and preserving all sorts of food," said Melissa Kellner, treasurer of the Chena Tool Library.
Kris Capps, October 4, 2023. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
The city has already received $5 million in funding for the library from the Alaska Legislature. The $10 million bond could be taken from sales taxes, but City Manager John Moosey is hopeful that additional state or federal funding will help foot the bill. He said a decision hasn’t been made on whether to repair or rebuild the old building.
Part of a series of virtual talks/Q&A sessions with artists featured in the How to Survive exhibition at the Anchorage Museum. Artists explore their own practice in relationship to climate change and care. This week’s session features Carolina Caycedo and Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich in conversation with Anchorage Museum Chief Curator Francesca Du Brock.
Seed Lab, Tent City Press, and the Anchorage Public Library are teaming up to make zines! Shortened from the term fanzine, “zines” have roots in fandom of early science fiction from the 1930’s. Since then, making zines has been a popular method of sharing art, information, humor and the whole gamut of types of literature in a small, informal way. Anyone can make zines about anything.
Check out the full schedule of zine workshops below - more details on each event to come. Unless specifically noted, all workshops are open to participants of all ages. Materials will be provided. You can attend one or a few!
Sonya Kelliher-Combs’s sculptures address weighty subjects with a lightness that feels like grace. For example, her Idiot Strings installations (2001–5; 2012–13)—paper-thin mitten sculptures, strung together in pairs, that dangle across the gallery like a mobile—began as memorials to relatives of hers who took their own lives. Remnants (2016) mummifies actual animal body parts, from walrus bones to seal intestines, within translucent resin rectangles. Mark, Polar Bear (2019) defamiliarizes a US flag by overlaying it with scruffy polar bear fur. While such themes and materials may sound grisly, Kelliher-Combs’s handiwork imbues her art with tenderness.
Artwork by Susan Hamilton, Haida Master Bead Artist, will be on display in House of Learning, Peninsula College Longhouse [in Port Angeles] from Tuesday to Dec. 14.
The exhibit includes a series of beaded Octopus Bags and other beaded artworks. Each of Hamilton’s Octopus Bags is personalized for an individual; the works were inspired by a display of these distinctly shaped bags that Hamilton viewed at the Alaska State Museum while visiting her family in Juneau, Alaska.
On Sept. 19, Alaska Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan applauded an additional nearly $54 million in grants under the federal Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program (TBCP).
Among the grants is $4.5 million to purchase and install Starlink, a low Earth orbit satellite communications network owned by SpaceX, in 1,410 homes and nine community institutions on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.
Alaska has thus far received more than $400 million under the tribal program, most of which is going to fiber-optic network projects spearheaded by GCI, the primary internet service provider for Western Alaska, and its partners. The Sept. 19 grant announcement is the first mention of federal funding for Starlink in Alaska.
Evan Erickson, September 21, 2023. KYUK.org.
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