Online Exhibitions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.