Archived Exhibitions

This 50th anniversary exhibition presents artworks from the school district’s student artists ranging from kindergarten through high school.

Stuart Hyatt’s Stations installation examines knowing about the land through sound. The project invites questioning of western modalities of mapping, which so often privilege the visual, by encouraging listening as a way of knowing and making sense of our world.

Counter Cartographies: Living the Land presents contemporary artworks that examine our relationship to land, proposing alternative ways of thinking about and experiencing the landscape around us.

John Grade's Spark project explores how wildfires are becoming more frequent and intense, and their impact on our lives and landscapes. What we might learn from forest fire ecology?

Contemporary Alaska photographer Charles Mason captures present-day Denali National Park through images made with a 19th-century photographic technique called the collodion process.

Rowan Renee explores conflicting and complex ideas of femininity, such as the ability to give life and take life, and the divide between wildness and domesticity.

This exhibition, told through archival photos and ephemera, showcases the richness and resilience of Black lives in Alaska.

Inupiaq artist Ronald Senungetuk (1933-2020) was a world-renowned sculptor, silversmith and woodcarver who blended ancestral Inupiaq forms with modern concepts and materials.

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.

Alaska Biennial is organized by the Anchorage Museum and celebrates place through the lens of contemporary art. Alaska Biennial participants are Alaska-based contemporary artists exploring the North, its people, histories, and landscapes through a variety of media.

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.

As part of the North x North Reimagined Festival, visit the lawn of the Anchorage Museum from Monday night, September 14 through the night of Sunday, September 20, to view Haustoria, a light and sound installation by artist Annie Mitchell.

Arctic Remix considers how Indigenous technologies have informed, inspired, or anticipated modern-day design and technology innovations. Objects highlighted in this exhibition point to what has changed, what has been remixed, and what has stayed the same.  

Weeks Feel Like Days, Months Feel Like Years is a participatory audio artwork developed by Paul Walde in which performers are invited to interpret a series of five text-based scores that prompt responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This public photography and audio installation based on the Pulitzer-Prize-winning series by Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica is part of listening to people telling their own stories, in their own voices and about recognizing both the power and powerlessness of silence. 

The Anchorage Museum’s Aperture project brings multiple exhibitions and artists together with public programming in a year-long series that testifies to the power of images. This project demonstrates how photography and video may offer new views of Northern place and people. 

Created to Hold Power (Intellectual Property) is a digital solo exhibition of new works by Nicholas Galanin.

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.

Temporary installations throughout Anchorage, posing questions about and connecting us to the natural world. Shelters are located on the Anchorage Museum lawn, the 5^th Avenue parking garage roof, SEED Lab parking lot, Chanstnu Muldoon Park, The Gardens at Bragaw, and Kiwanis Fish Creek Park through November and feature images by multiple artists examining the Northern landscape. The installations will be in place through November 2020.

An ongoing photography project presenting images taken by Andreas Hoffmann in the Disko Bay area in northwest Greenland.

A pivotal art form of the last 100 years, film is a powerful medium for telling stories of people and place. Circumpolar Cinema shares a selection of films by artists from the Circumpolar North.

The archival photographs and camera equipment in this collection spanning the 20th century show how photographic technologies have changed and shaped the way we create and consume pictures and how we view Alaska's history and its future.

Take A Journey Through Art for the 48th annual Anchorage School District student art exhibition, showcasing artwork from more than 750 student artists from grades kindergarten through high school.

Through an array of images and audio interviews, infographics and forward-thinking design, Evicted offers an immersive experience for understanding the crisis of low-income renter eviction, how it developed and how communities may respond.

Can design help combat homelessness? With evictions a serious issue nationally and extreme weather events displacing thousands, houselessness is one of society’s biggest challenges. Through the project Houseless, the Anchorage Museum invites visitors to consider ways design can contribute to solutions.

From snowmachines and kick sleds to adapted winter gear and equipment, Snow Flyers celebrates decades of Northern ingenuity for survival, sport and transportation.

Organized in collaboration with the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway, this exhibition offers audiences an opportunity to experience installations and sculptures that reflect life in Northern Norway and everyday experiences with the Arctic landscape.

Nine days of programs, performances, pop-up events, installations and artist interventions taking place Friday, Oct. 18 through Saturday, Oct. 26.

Explore the enduring mystery behind Sir John Franklin’s tragic expedition. Through historical artifacts and Inuit oral history, this groundbreaking exhibition provides the most comprehensive account to date of Franklin’s final voyage. 

François Étienne Musin, HMS Erebus in the Ice

Experience the Arctic and Arctic research through immersive experiences.

Providing context for the PBS Kids series Molly of Denali, the first nationally distributed children’s TV series in the U.S. featuring an Alaska Native lead character, this exhibition presents brief historical overview of how Indigenous people have been represented in media throughout the 20th century.

Celebrate salmon culture in Alaska in its many forms, from commercial, subsistence and sport fishing to processing, preserving and eating through a mutli-media exhibition presented in conjunction with The Salmon Project.

This showcase gives kindergarten through high school students the opportunity to experience their artwork in a museum. Presented in conjunction with National Youth Art Month, student artwork is also on view at other locations across Anchorage and Eagle River. 

Representing the Yup’ik windmaker spirit, Tumaneq, and created in the early 1900s, the four dance masks in this exhibition are together for the first time in more than a century. 

Shifts in innovation, technology, and the North’s physical and cultural landscape flavor the changing story of food culture in Alaska, as told in this exhibition through films, objects, art installations, ephemera — and food.

Image by Brian Kimmel

Alison Marks challenges assumptions and expectations about Tlingit art, blending formline with nontraditional materials and techniques as a means to engage with a constantly evolving cultural landscape.

Alison Marks, Bearemoji

Elizabeth Irving’s paintings present a mythological interpretation of the Alaska landscape.

Elizabeth Eero Irving, All Things Remembered (The Five Rivers)

All-Alaska Biennial features contemporary work by Alaska artists. This juried exhibition is a continuation of the museum’s All-Alaska Juried and Earth, Fire & Fibre exhibitions, which began more than 30 years ago to encourage creation of new works in all media by Alaska artists. Guest juror Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation in Yukon, Canada, and is an independent curator and writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Kristy Summers, Descend (detail)

New and existing artworks by Northern artists present the Arctic through depictions of two iconic animals that depend upon sea ice: the walrus and the polar bear.

Janice Wright Cheney, Spectre

The Power of Energy recalls humans’ first encounters with fire and draft animals, considers the myriad uses of energy in the 21st century and ponders what might be next.

Thomas Chung reaches beyond words to illustrate, celebrate and mourn the human experience.

Thomas Chung, Indra’s Net

Rarefied Light, an annual juried exhibition organized by the Alaskan Photographic Center, showcases the best of Alaska’s fine art photography.

Doug Yates, Road Trip (detail)

Created by New York-based artist and educator Pablo Helguera, Librería Donceles encourages social engagement through multilingual conversations, performances and workshops.

Pablo Helguera, Librería Donceles

An accomplished weaver, bentwood artist, and ivory and soapstone carver, Gertrude Svarny presents a distinct interpretation of Unangan history and culture.

Gertrude Svarny, And She Borrowed Her Husband’s Eagle Feather Cape

The Unsettled exhibition includes 200 artworks by 80 artists living and/or working in a super-region we call the Greater West, a geographic area stretching from Alaska to Patagonia and from Australia to the American West. Works included span 2,000 years, ranging from Pre-Columbian to modern and contemporary art.

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

Camouflage: In Plain Sight expands beyond the familiar associations of camouflage to explore how we work to be seen and unseen. Through the lenses of natural history, military history, art, design, technology, fashion and popular culture, Camouflage highlights the contrast between the functional and cultural.