Lisa Kamahamak Lynch recently completed a three-week residency at the Sheldon Jackson Museum, where she explored the intersection of traditional Inupiaq art and contemporary practices. The residency, which ran from June through the first week of July, allowed Lynch to immerse herself in her craft while engaging with locals and tourists.
Lynch is known for her meticulous beadwork, painting, and traditional crafts. She says she draws on generations of Inupiaq knowledge to create art that is beautiful in it's simplicity.
Freya Anderson, Head of Information Services and Historical Collections at the Alaska State Library, discusses the Talking Book Center, SLED, and more.
Museums across the country are increasingly caught up in partisan skirmishes, called out for their exhibits, programming, or for taking (or not taking) a stand on current events. What kinds of pressure—protests, lawsuits, threats to funding—are being brought to bear? How can museums avoid or respond to these threats?
Join Center for the Future of Museums’ director Elizabeth Merritt for Future Chats—a new series from AAM exploring trends, breaking news, and implications for our sector. Elizabeth will chat with special guest Julie Decker, Director/CEO of the Anchorage Museum, about the implications of one recent story about the current culture wars.
"It was a dark and stormy night" would be the classic start to the story that Wrangell historian and podcaster Ronan Rooney told on Aug. 10, delving into the wreck of the Star of Bengal sailing ship near Wrangell in 1908.
Rooney gave a compelling presentation about the fate of the 1,797-ton, 262-foot ship to an audience of more than 35 people at the Ketchikan Public Library, detailing the ship's history and how 111 men lost their lives in the maritime disaster.
Danelle Kelly, August 16, 2024. Ketchikan Daily News.
The Irene Ingle Public Library will host Petersburg-based artist Ashley Lohr, who owns her jewelry business The Rosie Finn. Lohr will teach a workshop on how to make torch fired enamel earrings. She speaks with KSTK’s Colette Czarnecki on her process with jewelry making, her passion with it and what to expect at her workshop, for those who were lucky enough to reserve a spot before it reached its maximum capacity. The conversation was pre-recorded by telephone while Lohr waited in an airport, so a loudspeaker can be heard periodically throughout.
This is an interactive web map created as part of the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake. The website features a map display with suggested tour stops in Anchorage and historical photographs taken shortly after the earthquake. Buildings in Anchorage that were severely damaged, sites of major landslides, and locations of post-earthquake engineering responses are highlighted. The web map can also be used online as a virtual tour.
Staff at three borough offices saw a need and got together to do something about it.
Their answer is to provide after-school activities three days a week over the next three months.
“There’s always been the need for after-school care in the community … to fill that gap for parents and children,” said Sarah Scambler, director of the Irene Ingle Public Library.
The activities will be free; no advance registration required. The program is open to children 7 through 13 years old, though younger children are welcome, but they must be accompanied by someone at least 14 years old.
Larry Persily, August 28, 2024. Wrangell Sentinel.
Features Denali National Park & Preserve, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, and Sitka National Historical Park
In a historical building, tucked amongst spruce, the Denali National Park museum collection storage room holds an array of items from the past: trace fossils, mammoth bones, projectile points and stone tools, historical photographs, and Barbara Washburn's parka — worn as she summited Denali and became the first woman to do so.
National Park Service museum curator Kimberly Arthur manages the care, storage, record keeping and other aspects of the collection, maintaining long-term safeguards to reduce deterioration and potential damages. She stores items based on their individual needs and is mindful of factors within the facility that could lead to degradation, like temperature, humidity, and visible and UV light exposure...
But on June 30, 2024, following weeks of warm, dry weather, a patch of black spruce trees ignited near the railroad tracks that run along the park’s eastern boundary. The spark was just a mile north of the Denali National Park entrance. Flames rose from the Mount Healy hillside and smoke filled the Nenana River Canyon. The fire spread to more than 300 acres in just a few hours.
More and more, federal land management agencies are emphasizing including Indigenous knowledge in the science of managing public lands, in policymaking, and in decision-making. Doing this isn’t simply a matter of park staff recognizing the value of Indigenous knowledge; it’s the law. But although collaborating with Indigenous communities is critical to effective land stewardship, overburdening them with requests can lead to research fatigue. Instead, the National Park Service’s Alaska Region is using archival research and other scholarly humanities methods to uncover existing repositories of Indigenous knowledge. The region’s work shows that these methods can be useful tools for bridging the gap between Indigenous knowledge and all aspects of managing our natural and cultural heritage.
“Inner Stellar” is a body of work by Homer artist Marjorie Scholl that explores the themes of trauma and resiliency.
“These paintings honor the experience of reacquainting with one’s ‘inner child’,” Scholl said. “Each portrait illustrates someone in their bright essence, holding the weight of their unique ancestry — hardships, healing, and all — with an authentically determined outlook.”
On display at the Pratt Museum since May and continuing through September, Scholl’s paintings include large individual portraits that showcase community members’ intergenerational life experiences, from children to seniors. The exhibit also includes a series of smaller portraits of people — most who she has not met, but imagined — that she titled “Newcomers.”
A Mat-Su library advisory panel tasked with examining challenged books voted Monday to recommend that "Identical" by Ellen Hopkins be removed from borough public library shelves, even as the borough’s attorney told the panel that his office does not consider the book illegal.
"Identical" follows the experiences of twin sisters and includes themes of incest, rape, drug use, abuse, bulimia and suicide. It is shelved in the young adult section of three Matanuska-Susitna Borough libraries.
The committee voted 5-2 to recommend that "Identical" be removed from circulation. Two members voted to move it from the "young adult" section to the "adult" section. One member said she chose both "remove the book" and an option of "other" included on the borough-created book review scorecard issued to panelists, and said she wanted the book burned.
On a recent river trip in northern Alaska, scientists from the University of Alaska Museum of the North found a lost world, a time of “polar forests with reptiles running around in them.”
That’s a description from Patrick Druckenmiller, director of the museum and a paleontologist with the ability to look at river rocks and see the footprints of an animal that walked there from 90 million to 100 million years ago.
In early August 2024, Druckenmiller and his colleague Kevin May, along with Greg Erickson and Tyler Hunt of Florida State University, floated 160 miles along the upper Colville River on Alaska’s North Slope. There in the rocks on the shoreline, they found fossilized tracks of many species of dinosaur, as well as the pebbled skin impressions left behind by an armored ankylosaur and other plant-eating dinosaurs.
Sitka Public Library offers satellite internet during lengthy outage
A widespread internet and cellular outage in Sitka continued into the weekend. Sitka has been without internet access since Thursday (8-29-24) after an undersea fiber optic cable broke, cutting off the island from the online world.
GCI provides internet and cell service for most Sitkans. In an email to KCAW on Saturday (8-31-24), GCI Communications Manager Josh Edge said that a fiber repair ship is en route to the site of the break in the cable, and is expected to arrive in five to six days. Once on site, Edge wrote that the repairs could take up to six days depending on the complexity of the situation. Edge said GCI is working to fully restore service as quickly as possible...
The Sitka Public Library is back online using satellite internet that is available to the public. The library is open for extended hours this Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. with plans to return to regular business hours on Tuesday, September 3.
Chilkat weaving is among the world’s most complex and admired textile arts techniques, entailing years of study and practice. Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and other Native peoples of the Northwest Coast of Alaska and British Columbia have traditionally employed it to create ceremonial robes. Historically, they used fibers made of mountain-goat hair and yellow-cedar bark, often in a color scheme of black, yellow, blue-green, and white. Over the summer of 2023, the Juneau-Douglas City Museum in Juneau, Alaska, displayed 18 children’s robes made by expert Chilkat weavers, introducing this Indigenous art form to thousands of visitors during the high tourist season.
The Kodiak Historical Society is marking its 70th anniversary in September with a reception and time capsule. Kodiak History Museum Executive Director Kristen O’Lear said it’s a time to thank a generation of Kodiak’s professional and lay historians for their contributions over the years.
Libraries around the state are scrambling after learning a key state grant was being slashed six weeks into the fiscal year. Small libraries stand to be hit the hardest, and in some cases, may be forced to close their doors entirely.
There’s no running water at the community library in Cooper Landing. The log cabin was built in the early 1980s and is next to the Kenai River, which rushes by on an early fall morning.
Inside, logs crackle in a wood stove while Virginia Morgan shows a patron how to use the library’s website. Morgan is the library’s volunteer director. In that role, she’s responsible for overseeing library operations and keeping the building running.
Anchorage Public Library is celebrating Library Card Sign-Up Month with duct tape, kombucha, and ice cream! With duct tape and a library card you can solve 99% of your problems. In September new cardholders receive a free roll of APL logo duct tape while supplies last. APL has also partnered with Made in Alaska- Zip Kombucha for a limited-edition custom kombucha flavor “To Chai For” with proceeds being donated back to the library. Love ice cream? Help us create a custom book themed flavor inspired by your favorite children’s book with Scoops & Stories.
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Chair Maria Rosario Jackson and a small team of NEA staff visited Alaska August 20 through August 23, 2024. This was Chair Jackson’s first trip to Alaska and included site visits to organizations and the opportunity to meet with artists and arts leaders in Anchorage, Bethel, and Juneau. The group learned about the challenges artists are facing and opportunities for the future, as well as how the integration of arts and culture is supporting the health and well-being of individuals and communities throughout the state.
The mother and small business owner had searched online and in stores near her home in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, but she could not find any books to teach her young children the Yup’ik language.
Growing up, Corbett says, she was more fluent in the language – because she lived in the largely Yup’ik community of Bethel, Alaska.
“And so obviously being immersed in that, you understand more and can speak more,” Corbett says. “But being away from it – the community that I live in, it’s not a language that’s normally spoken.”
Dancers moved their dancing fans to the rhythmic beat of the Yup’ik Blessing Song in the Igiugig school gymnasium earlier this month. The event was hosted to welcome more than two dozen members of the Smithsonian Natural Museum of History Advisory Board to the village of Igiugig.
The Smithsonian repatriated the remains of 24 Igiugig ancestors to the community in 2017. They returned to the village this month to see the impact that the repatriation has had on the community.
April Hostetter, a staff member at the village council, was one of many to welcome the board and host the event. She said the visit was meaningful for the community and the museum.
Margaret Sutherland, August 30, 2024. KDLG.org.
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