Past Exhibitions

Borealis charts the journey that Toirkens and Brandt Corstius made through the region in eight chapters, each highlighting the stories of the forests and people who live and work in them. Now that the effects of climate change can be seen and felt more clearly, especially in the High North, these stories are more important than ever before.

With original interviews connecting the past and present, Mana: The History We Inherit offers insight into the histories of Filipinos in Alaska.

This presentation of student art gives kindergarten through high school students the opportunity to showcase their artworks in a museum. 

To Hear the Earth Before the End of the World is sound-based project by artist LaMont Hamilton.

Good Medicine brings together a group of Indigenous healers and medicine people to collectively create, share knowledge, and practice in community.

Alaska Biennial celebrates place through the lens of contemporary art.

Opening in the centennial year of the completion of the Alaska Railroad, this new exhibition looks at the history, impact, and legacy of the railroad through archival images, objects, and ephemera.

Generations before statehood and earlier even than the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s, Black men and women arrived in Alaska and have since participated in politics, economic development, and culture.

The Place I Call Home reflects the people, places, textures, and moods photographer Jovell Rennie associates with his hometown of Anchorage, Alaska.

This multi-site-specific work explores the linked forces of a changing climate and rising inequality that braids together allusions to freedom, survival, containment, and control.

The Alaska Mural Project (AMP), in collaboration with Anchorage Downtown Partnership and the Anchorage Museum, will work with artists Will Kozloff, Crystal Worl, Ash Adams, Ted Kim, and Justin DeWolf on murals to be installed in Anchorage’s downtown...

The Art of the North galleries in the museum’s new wing present the museum’s art collection from the perspectives of American art and an international North.

The Alaska exhibition tells the story of Alaska through multiple voices and perspectives reflecting the ingenuity, technology, ways of knowing and intimate understanding of the landscape that have allowed people to survive and thrive across the North.

Arctic Remix considers how Indigenous technologies have informed, inspired, or anticipated modern-day design and technology innovations.

A Future Ready project by Anchorage artists Amy Meissner and Brian Adams. Meissner sewed “suits” from Tyvek, abandoned quilts, used household protective equipment and other materials. The work addresses survival essentials, anticipation of the inconceivable, and our associations with place.

A virtual exhibition by artist Mary Mattingly, that proposes a mobile and wearable future through ideas of shelter. Based on an assumption that more people will lack access to basic resources, the Wearable Homes project proposes both an absurd dystopic commentary about what consumption could look like, but also possible solutions.

Alaska is home to diverse cultures and tattooing traditions. Inuit tattoo has been practiced in Alaska for millennia by Iñupiat and Yup’ik women. Colonization suppressed traditional tattooing, but a new generation of Indigenous women are revitalizing and restoring the practice.

Featuring work from artists of Alaska and other parts of the US, Russia, Canada, and Scandinavia, Listen Up provides audiences a listening experience and a survey of sound art today.

The Yup’ik people have no word for science yet their tools were so well designed that they allowed the Yupiit to live in a land no one else would inhabit.

Dena'inaq' Huch'ulyeshi: The Dena'ina Way of Living, curated by the Anchorage Museum in 2013, was the first comprehensive exhibition about Dena’ina Athabascan people presenting Dena’ina history and culture through art, music, storytelling, re-created settings and hands-on activities.

Artists, mothers, scientists and makers included in this exhibition testify to the vital role that both Indigenous and newcomer women have held, and continue to hold, in Northern communities. Women’s voices and visions provide rich ground for imagining a future guided by principles of gender equity, sustainability and strength.

Visitations by Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson explores how polar bears interact with humans in times of climate change. The socially engaged and research-based collaborations are informed by artists, historians, ecologists, folklorists and zoologists.

Protection: Adaptation and Resistance centers Indigenous ways of knowing. In times of pandemic, climate crisis, and ongoing assaults to human rights, Indigenous Alaska artists today are envisioning the future through design, tattoo, regalia, and graphic arts.

Pass the Mic celebrates contemporary Alaska musicians and sound artists, inviting interactive participation in making and listening to the sounds and songs in Alaska today.

For the people who reside there, Alaska’s Arctic isn’t a curiosity, a wasteland or an untouched wilderness — it is home.

Features more than 600 objects from the Smithsonian's collections that were selected and interpreted with help from Alaska Native advisers.