Archived Exhibitions

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.

Through her project CircumSolar, Migration 1, artist and designer Rebeca Mendez looks to explore themes critical to our time, such as migration, climate change and consumption. Through the Arctic tern’s relationship to the Arctic and Antarctic, we can examine changing landscapes, as well ideas of safety and refuge.

This online exhibition of K-12 student art is presented through a school-year-long collaboration between the Anchorage Museum and the Anchorage School District.

The artwork that makes up Future Cartography tackles the concept of impending massive changes on the surface of the Earth itself.

Personality and History Are Both Revealed in Structures is an online exhibition featuring a selection of photographs by Stephen Cysewski (1945-2020) taken across Alaska from the 1970s until his death in 2020.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

This all-ages exhibition explores the things people like in our mass and global culture through collectables, contemporary art and fandom sub-culture.

Be prepared to look at the world in a whole new way – through the eyes of a walrus-and ammonite-obsessed scientist and an artist with a fondness for cheeseburgers, ratfish and trilobites – in this exhibition on Alaska fossils.

Ray Troll, The Eternal Coastline

In 2017, Mireles photographed people of Anchorage in neighborhoods throughout the city. This exhibition includes images from that project.

Welcome to Our North is an exploration of a “brand” for Anchorage that is based upon quality of life, inclusiveness, a distinct urban culture, resilient attitude and celebration of nature. It reflects people sharing the experience of the North.

Using off-the-shelf technology to deliver content is a new strategy for the museum. Its accessibility is what makes it exciting to museum curators. This project serves as an entry point for conversation, meditation, exploration, education and awareness of the Arctic.

SLOW invites viewers to contemplate the pace and complexity of the lived experience through film and video.

One hundred historical photographs from the museum’s collection highlighting life in the North.

Alaska and Russia are intimately connected by land and history but are also distant — separated by water, language, war and politics.

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

The museum's Cabin Fever program is a way to explore, combat and celebrate our associations with winter. Cabin Fever takes the form of an exhibition in this iteration of our series, which presents non-narrative films as a single-channel installation.

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.

This multimedia installation and two-month performance by Anchorage-based Iñupiaq artist Allison Warden takes the form of an Iñupiat ceremonial qargi. Warden’s version is a futuristic recreation of a ceremonial house, where she allows her audience to gently explore these spaces in a contemporary context.

Indigenous leaders, activists, artists and scholars address common misperceptions about the North, fostering critical commentary about these issues through the exhibition “Without Boundaries: Visual Conversations.”

Design works to establish a sense of place, sending a strong message of identity. The Anchorage Museum's 61° Studio program emphasizes the importance of design within communities.

The predominant stereotype of the Arctic is that it is a place untouched. Portraits of Place breaks open the idea of a pristine landscape and replaces it with a North that is both inhabited and complex.

View behind-the-scenes work that conservators do, and learn about the new Alaska and Art of the North exhibitions opening Sept. 15, 2017 in this temporary visible storage and conservation lab.

Interest in the Arctic has preoccupied explorers for hundreds of years, and that fascination with the North continues today. View From Up Here: The Arctic at the Center of the World is an international contemporary art exhibition that highlights contemporary investigations into the Arctic – through the perspective of artists.

The name “Arctic” comes from a Greek word meaning “near the bear.” The Arctic region is in the northernmost part of Earth. This family-friendly exhibition explores the Arctic environment through art and science, with exploration into the Arctic for all ages.

Adaptation and resistance, exaggeration and lies, dreams and memories are recurring themes in Nicholas Galanin’s work. He draws upon a wide range of Indigenous technologies and global materials when exploring ideas through his art.

Approaching the world of hockey not simply through the lens of a fan, but rather as a cultural observer, Conti sees many of society's "norms" and expectations played out on rinks around the North and the U.S.

Living Alaska shares the far-reaching impacts of the Rasmuson Art Acquisition Fund and a sample of the artwork it has preserved for the public. Curated by Sven Haakanson, Jr. and designed by the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, the exhibition contains 25 pieces loaned from 12 different museums.

We're redefining the traditional museum experience. In fall 2015, we’ll display Vincent van Gogh’s masterpieces in larger-than-life proportions. Be prepared for a vibrant symphony of light, color and sound, combined and amplified to create an unforgettable multi-sensory experience

Although the common perception of the Arctic is that it is a vast nothingness, Florian Schulz’s photographs reveal a world teeming with life amidst complex natural systems — systems that fuel our global economy and affect our health and environment.

Baseball has been an important part of community life in Alaska for more than a century. Northern communities played the national pastime in spring, summer, fall and winter (ever see a baseball diamond on ice?). This exhibition of historic photographs, objects and memorabilia showcases the rich history of baseball in Anchorage and throughout Alaska.

Captain Cook came to Alaska to explore the continental coast in search of a long-sought Northwest Passage. Cook’s experience in the Arctic continues to resonate with the opening of a potential passage through the Arctic today, which, due to the effects of climate change and rapidly melting sea ice, is expected to become a navigable, commercially viable route by the 250th anniversary of Cook’s voyage in 2028.

Mariano Gonzales has a reputation for fearlessness. He is bold and experimental as artist, activist, and educator at the University of Alaska Anchorage where he chairs the art department.

Much of the oceans' trash is swirling in one of five gyres, which are large systems of rotating ocean currents. Similar accumulations of human debris exist in every ocean. The world shrinks as we all become connected through our litter, yet somehow we are still severed from the problem we've created. Garbage is killing the very life that depends on the ocean as a source of food and habitat. Now, in one of the most breathtaking places on the planet, a unique scientific expedition and art exhibition brings the problem into perspective.