Homer’s galleries and public art spaces celebrate the beauty and energy of an Alaska summer with a showcase of artist’s work inspired by the season. Stroll the galleries, meet the artists and enjoy the variety of mediums on display...
Bunnell Street Arts Center presents Anchorage artist Steve Gordon. Painting the landscape of Southcentral Alaska for the past 35 years, Gordon is inspired by color, pattern, shapes, movement, flow and contrasts as he moves through nature...
Homer Council on the Arts presents “Interfaces With Alaska,” paintings by Rozzi Redmond. Redmond finds inspiration in nature and her paintings are intended as memoirs of her experiences of and wandering through Alaska landscapes...
The Pratt Museum celebrates their ongoing Main Gallery exhibit, “Inner Stellar,” paintings by Marjorie Scholl. A series of painted portraits of community members that are set in a forest of birch trees, each subject actively participated in the creation of their portrait, including sharing related personal anecdotes.
The Noel Wien Library will host visits by three authors during the month of August, all at the Noel Wien Library Auditorium at 1215 Cowles St.
The authors are Dion Leonard, Tricia Brown and Michael Engelhard.
Aug. 10, 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Dion Leonard is the author of "Finding Gobi: The inspirational, heartwarming and true story of a man and his best friend." Leonard will present at the 11 a.m. Story Time and at 2 p.m. for all ages.
Aug. 17. 1-2:30 p.m. Tricia Brown is the author of "The Queen of Fairbanks: Extraordinary family secrets and untold stories of America's farthest north bag lady."
Aug. 24, 3 p.m. Michael Engelhard is author of "Arctic Traverse: A thousand-mile summer of trekking the Brooks Range" and "Why the River Knows: Essays from the Heart of Alaska."
Two major grants to Alutiiq organizations will support the Alutiiq Museum’s efforts to create an entirely new set of displays for its renovated exhibit hall. In June, Koniag received a $231,889 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to develop displays on Alutiiq subsistence, community life, and spirituality at the museum. In July, the Native Village of Afognak received $98,968 in grant funding from the US Bureau of Indian Affairs for museum displays exploring the impacts of Russian and American colonization. The funds will help the Alutiiq Museum tell the Alutiiq story from a new perspective. Executive Director April Counceller explained.
“Two years ago, we began planning the displays for our new galleries with audience assistance,” she said. “Through this process, we developed a beautiful design. The galleries will be organized around four Alutiiq values and explore areas like ties to the land, social life, and spirituality. Visitors will also find a gallery devoted to recent history and updated versions of old favorites like our kayak display and children’s corner. The grants will help us take the designs from the computer to the gallery!”
To assist with this process, the museum is hiring an exhibit apprentice. “Exhibit projects are complex and the best way to learn is through hands-on experience,” said Counceller. “The grant funds will allow us to use this once-in-a-generation project for training. We are hiring a full-time exhibit apprentice to work beside Exhibit Manager Alexandra Painter.” Those interested in the position can find application materials on the opportunity page of the museum’s website.
About three dozen bikes sat abandoned in the New Hope Compassionate Ministries’ parking lot as their riders wandered through one of Anchorage’s unexpected gardens. The Garden of Weeden sits in the corner of a parking lot and could easily be mistaken for just an unkempt shamble of bushes.
However, as soon as you walk through it, stumbling across merrily growing roses, mint, strawberries and rhubarb, it’s easy to recognize it as a freely growing garden composed mostly of plants that volunteered themselves to the space.
The cyclists explored it fully on a recent evening, stopping to pluck off leaves of mint and plop strawberries in their mouths. Their curiosity and excitement is exactly what the latest rendition of the Anchorage Museum bike tours was meant to spark.
The Anchorage Museum, partnering with community leaders and the non-profit organization Bike Anchorage, has been hosting bike tours for over a year now. The two-hour tour on July 11 showcased gardens in downtown Anchorage.
Thanks to everyone for making the umpteenth annual Friends of the Library 4th of July cookout a success. We served about 700 brat plates with chips and a pop for a dollar less than last year (just 5 bucks) in gratitude for community support of the library. We made a little less but it was worth it. Thanks especially to Howser’s and Kevin Shove for helping us cut costs and to Haines Packing and Harry Rietze for the ice and tubs. Lisa Krebs, the Nemec family, Steve Smith, Chip Lende, Richard Clements, Laura Clements, Amanda Hamill, The Chilkat Inlet Retreat, Lori Carter, Larry Jurgeleit and Jon Graves made it all happen. The funds raised will be used by the Friends for special library programs and celebrations. Thanks also to the Haines Friends of Recyling for helping us to significantly reduce the waste. We are lucky to live here.
Heather Lende, July 20, 2024. Chilkat Valley News.
The Friends of the Library would like to thank our many friends who helped with the library book sale. Haines folks donated lots of remarkable and fascinating books to offer for the sale. It was fun to see the many interests and find new reads among the volumes.
The sale was organized by Barb Blood, who is the best at setting up, rounding up helpers, and is always cheerful and kind. A great group of kids on a church trip helped with some heavy lifting of boxes and tables: Isaac Jones, Isaac Mason, Mac Robinson and Grady Robinson. Barb Blood, Elena Saunders, Linda Moyer, Connie Staska, Laura Murphy and Debbie Gravel worked hard to sort and display the many books. On the 4th of July, Margaret Plucker, Connie Staska, and Debbie Gravel kept up with our generous shoppers. We also greatly appreciate all the help and hard work the staff of the library provide to accept donations, lug boxes, and deal with the many details that a large book sale entails. Thanks to all who supported this fundraiser to benefit programs and materials at the library.
Debbie Gravel, July 20, 2024. Chilkat Valley News.
Earlier this year, United Way Mat-Su founded the Tool Library, providing essential tools and equipment for community members eager to undertake outdoor projects that benefit the greater community.
Founder of the project and Development and Outreach Director at United Way Mat-Su, Michelle Harmeling looks forward to the community utilizing what the Tool Library offers.
“The goal of the tool library is to make the implements and infrastructure needed for community projects readily available and to reduce the cost and burden of volunteer groups and agencies,” said Harmeling.
What is it?
The United Way of Mat-Su (UWMS) Tool Library is a catalog of available tools to check out and utilize with the intent of community service and improvement.
X’unei Lance Twitchell’s long-awaited first poetry book presents creative work drawn from his years of contemplating his life as an Indigenous man, his knowledge of the Lingit language and his advocacy for Native language revitalization, and his deep-felt considerations of cultural losses and resilience. In four sections based on how the Lingit people speak of gagaan — the sun — these poems spread their light into beauty and realized truths. Some poems make use of Lingit oratory style, although most are imagistic and contemporary in style. Ravens appear as tricksters, as do coyotes in a series of poems written while Twitchell spent time in Navajo country. Earthquakes, or what they suggest about tremors and unsettlings of different kinds, recur throughout.
On July 29, the FCC adopted a final Order allowing schools and libraries to obtain E-rate funding for hotspot devices and service off-campus. The Order, which SHLB supports, is intended to bring affordable wireless internet to low-income communities. The FCC's decision will build upon the Congressionally-funded Emergency Connectivity Fund, which has now expired. The new FCC Order, however, is more limited in scope and has several new rules, including a multi-year budget. This webinar will interpret the Order, review the timeline for applications, and take a detailed look at how schools and libraries can maximize the benefits of this important program.
NOGAHABARA DUNES — Karin Bodony has walked us to a sandy bowl, a place she has perhaps visited more than any other living person.
Karin is a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who lives in the village of Galena, 70 air miles south and east of here. Today, she has led three of us back to a blank spot in this vast oval of sand.
Here, on a dim, rainy afternoon 23 years ago, she and University of Alaska Fairbanks insect specialist Jim Kruse were walking through, on the way back to their camp in the distant woods after collecting bugs on the dunes.
As they hiked toward one lonely spruce tree that had somehow thrived in the desert, Karin peeled off to look at a strange smattering of rocks on top of the sand. Hundreds were scattered in a circle less than 20 feet across.
Xixtc’ i see Ruby Hughes won the Sewing Division of the Juried Arts show at Celebration earlier this year with her piece “Raven Transforms into Marilyn.” That’s right, Marilyn Monroe.
The button robe features a raven lined with crystals, with a likeness of the blonde bombshell on its chest, and a diamond-like rhinestone in its mouth. As Hughes explains, her inspiration for the piece was decades and generations in the making.
By day, Merna Lomack Wharton works a nine-to-five office job for the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. But at home, in her little second-floor apartment in Anchorage, she spends hours cleaning and prepping the pelts of arctic ground squirrels for the fancy parkas she’s becoming known for.
On a sunny day in mid-June, there’s a whole box of pelts next to Wharton on a couch in her living room. She sits there, a day after cleaning them with dish soap, rolling and softening the dry and yellowish, papery squirrel skins between her hands. It takes at least 100 squirrel hides to make a parka, and Wharton cleans and tans the hides herself. She is patient and thoughtful, and she says that the investment is worth it. She remembers her very first parka; her mother made it for her...
Wharton grew up in Akiachak. Her first language is Yugtun, the Indigenous Yup’ik language spoken widely across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Sometimes she can’t find an English adjective to explain how she feels, like when she describes what it feels like to wear a squirrel skin parka: “Takaryuk is out of respect. And shy.”
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