Archived Exhibitions

Dutch photographer Jeroen Toirkens and journalist Jelle Brandt Corstius visited boreal forests around the Circumpolar North, ending in Alaska in 2019, in search of the stories of the forests and people who live and work in them.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

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

For the past four years, Alaska photographer Kerry Tasker has followed surfers out onto the silty waters of Turnagain Arm to document their idiosyncratic lifestyle. He has witnessed the growth of a community and a culture, composed around a sole purpose—surfing the tide.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

Dena'inaq' Huch'ulyeshi: The Dena'ina Way of Living, curated by the Anchorage Museum, will be the first comprehensive exhibition about Dena’ina Athabascan people. This exhibition, opening in fall 2013, will feature about 200 Dena’ina objects from museums across the globe, including caribou skin clothing adorned with fine quill work, puffin beak rattles and birch bark cradles. Dena’ina history and culture will come to life through art, music, storytelling, re-created settings and hands-on activities.

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.