A project of Chad Taylor and Vania Hawkins (Intrinsic Landscapes)

These planters, temporarily installed on Seventh Avenue outside the Anchorage Museum, are a series of prototypes to “plant” trees in the city—reimagining the urban landscape and experience. The planter is designed to be mobile. The planters would be part of an ecosystem and a larger urban tree nursery system. The prototype is an example of one of these durable, efficient and flexible modules.

Chad and Vania say they love community-minded projects and stive to create a better community for tomorrow. 

The project identity has been created by Anchorage designer Karen Larsen.

This diagram shows downtown Anchorage.  The yellow squares (49 total) are abandoned tree wells that have been filled in with concrete or have exposed grating. Green circles are standing trees (in decline) and will be removed.  The TUF project proposes a more sustainable alternative.

We work with local artists to create murals in and outside SEED Lab and into the fabric of the city. Artists and designers Rejoy Armamento, Emma Sheffer, Karen Larsen and James Temte have all transformed the SEED Lab building façade and murals inside feature the work of the Anchorage chapter of AIGA, Bisco Taylor and Ted Kim.  We are also working with Ted Kim on murals on the facades of Anchorage urban buildings and for a mural in City Hall (with the Municipality of Anchorage Public Art Program). We are also working with Kim on illustrations for a book, exhibition and series of public artworks featuring Dena’ina language. Kim is an Alaska illustrator and skateboarder. His lifelong interest in drawing stems from the comics he read as a child. Kim was born in Hawaii and moved the Anchorage at the age of 2, when his father took a job with Reeve Aleutians Airlines.

More murals to come in 2020.

Building exteriors and parking lots around Anchorage, Alaska, are sparking conversations about the natural world thanks to public art installations that project illuminated images of glaciers and other natural forms onto them at night. Cloud Chamber, which featured images by Anchorage photographer Kerry Tasker, included still images and video depicting the vastness of the Alaska landscape document a rapidly changing landscape within an urban setting. Cloud Chamber was first projected outdoors at night on the Anchorage Museum’s glass and mirror façade during December 2019. It was projected onto the exterior of the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts in February 2020.

“Borealis,” featuring images by Dutch photographer Jeroen Toirkens, was a public art installation that projected images of the boreal forest in the form of photography and video. The images were projected onto the façade of the Anchorage Museum. The project highlighted the rapidly changing landscape within an urban setting.

Justin Brice Justin Brice Guariglia, Arctic Youth Ambassadors and members of the Anchorage community create signs in response to climate change as part of a project called Baked Alaska? Artist Justin Guariglia likes to spur conversations about contemporary issues. If you read the press his work generates, you’ll discover he envisions a definite role for art in drawing attention to the global environment. Guariglia is particularly interested in the role language plays in understanding climate change geographically, socially and politically. He likes to work in a format that “triggers a heightened sense of alert”: signage.

Guariglia came to Alaska in 2018 and 2019. He visited the Alaska tundra with a team of scientists who were investigating the Arctic’s rapidly thawing permafrost. The permafrost holds as much as much as 1,500 gigatons of carbon, twice the amount of carbon found in our atmosphere today. As the carbon-rich frozen soil thaws, it releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming, causing more polar ice to melt, and hastening the rise in sea level.

In October 2020, we installed this work by Amelia Winger-Bearskin. Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist/technologist who empowers people to leverage bleeding edge technology to effect positive change in the world. Amelia is the founder of the stupidhackathon.com. She is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan. The artwork is in collaboration with For Freedoms, an artist-run platform for civic engagement, discourse, and direct action for artists in the United States. In June 2018, For Freedoms launched the 50 State Initiative, described as the 'largest-ever public art project in the US. The artwork installation occurred on A Street in downtown Anchorage.

Anchorage Museum Façade projection, October 31-November 3, 2020. Voting is the cornerstone of democracy and represents fundamental questions about what it means to be a citizen. As centralized place-makers, museums have the inherent capability to help protect, promote, and practice the most fundamental constitutional right – the right to vote.

A series of graphic design installations throughout the city that played with phrases drawn from workshops that focus on civic solutions, with the theme It is Possible. These large-scale text installations appeared on the side of the Museum’s SEED Lab building and added phrases to a city water tower, bus stops, library, housing, mall, parking garages and other unexpected places. The Museum also worked with youth to create their own images and phrases and produced buttons and t-shirts for youth with the future phrases, in conjunction with the Museum for the United Nations and their project MY MARK: MY CITY.