Emergencies in Climate, Art and Society

Auditorium | 10:45 a.m.-12 p.m. 

Dean Spade observes that we live in times defined by crises of all kinds, where myths about social change instruct us to express our fear and rage through sanctioned methods of dissent, and that we need to figure out how to care for each other and fight back. In this presentation, he will discuss what mutual aid is, why mobilizing resistance matters, what makes it hard under current conditions, and how communities can work through those obstacles together.

Dean Spade is a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an author whose work focuses on queer and trans communities, racial and economic inequality, and mutual aid. He is the author of Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (and the Next) and Love in a Fcked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together (also the name of his podcast).

Auditorium | 12-1 p.m.
 
Amy Meissner discusses her most recent body of work, Transitional Objects, which combines discarded textiles, catastrophic thinking, and ridiculous scenarios to process motherhood and the uncontrollable. 

Meissner combines handwork, found objects and abandoned textiles to reveal narratives about the needle-based, physical and emotional labor of women. Since 2019, she has taught clothing and textile repair as an act of prolonging, care and accompaniment of vulnerable objects in transition.  

1-2 p.m.

Food is available for purchase at MUSE and at on-site food trucks. Lunch is not included with admission. Complimentary coffee and other beverages are available. 

Auditorium | 2-3 p.m.

Caroline Woolard will present Pollinator.coop, an artist-led network and fund for individuals and organizations working together to imagine and enact futures. Woolard has developed a two-sided practice that moves from exploring materials and techniques in the studio to facilitation and convening in public space. In the studio, she builds objects for groups. As a convener, she creates peer-to-peer experiences online and in person, including TradeSchool.coop and Art.coop.  

Woolard is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York whose work explores collaboration, shared resources, and new models for artistic and civic exchange. Institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Creative Time have commissioned and exhibited her work. She is Head of Foundations in the Department of Art and Design at Montclair State University and affiliated faculty at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. 

Atrium | 3-6 p.m.

Learn more about the work of community collaborators and connect with practical resources. Participating organizations include the Ethics Center and Institute of Social & Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Toolik Field Station and International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Anchorage Mutual Aid Network, Food Bank of Alaska, Alaska Heritage Emergency Network, Alaska Sea Grant, NOAA, Bean’s Café and Fresh International Gardens. 

Please Don't Feed the Instruments

Thomas Planetarium | 4-4:45 p.m. 

A two-part, 30-minute multimedia exploration featuring salvaged electronics, radios, acoustic detritus, and synthesizers, weaving together moments of technological risk, environmental disruption, and unintended consequence. Our modern world runs on wires, waves, magnets, and transistors. How prepared are we for disruptions that originate beyond Earth—or from systems of our own making?

In 1859, the Carrington Event, the largest solar storm ever recorded, disrupted telegraph systems and produced auroras visible across much of the globe. In 1961, the U.S. Armed Forces and MIT launched Project West Ford, an experiment intended to create an artificial ionosphere using hundreds of millions of copper needles placed in orbit. By the time the project succeeded in 1963, communications satellites had already made the concept obsolete, while the experiment helped prompt international debate about space debris and the shared use of space.

Please Don't Feed the Instruments is an experimental music project by Anchorage-based sound artist Andrew Israelsen, who is also a member of the Anchorage Museum staff.

Art of the North Galleries | 4-4:45 p.m.

This tour explores artworks and objects of resilience, perseverance, and survival on display in the Alaska Exhibition and Art of the North Galleries.

Seed Lab | 4-5:30 p.m.

We rely on our clothing to protect us, share our identity with the world, and maintain our comfort, so when garments fail, we may experience the breakage in an intimate way. Do you know what to do in the face of this semi-mundane emergency? Join artists Jamie Hirano and Amy Meissner for a hands-on garment repair workshop focusing on the simple tools, techniques, and materials needed to lessen barriers associated with prolonging the life of your clothing. Learn the meditative skills of darning, hand patching, and which situation calls for which mend. We welcome socks with holes, so consider bringing one to care for in this group workshop.

Anchorage-based artist Amy Meissner combines handwork, found objects, and abandoned textiles to reveal narratives about the needle-based, physical, and emotional labor of women. Since 2019, she has taught clothing and textile repair as an act of prolonging, care, and accompaniment of vulnerable objects in transition.

Jamie Hirano is an Anchorage-based fiber and textile artist whose practice begins with the body and radiates outward into acts of making, gathering, and connection. Hirano learned to sew by wanting to make clothing fit, developing a creative practice rooted in textiles, clothing, and shared making. 

Co Lab | 4-5:30 p.m.

Join Anchorage Museum staff to learn about emergency preparedness supplies and make your own emergency supply kit to take home. Learn about shear-wall structural design and how it protects buildings during earthquakes while engaging in a hands-on engineering challenge.

Art Lab | 4-5:30 p.m.

Join the Anchorage Museum Teen Climate Communicators in creating a community-sourced emergency blanket that reflects ideas of resilience and creativity. Contribute by decorating a fabric square with your thoughts and values, highlighting core principles of emergency preparedness, including understanding risks, making a plan, being a good neighbor, and getting involved. We will combine all contributions into an emergency-preparedness quilt, which will be featured in this year’s Teen Climate Communicators spring exhibition.

Art of the North Galleries | 5-6 p.m.

Join California-based artist Cameron Harvey for a conversation about climate change, grief, and artistic response in her installation Family of Things. Created in the wake of the 2024-25 wildfires in Los Angeles, Harvey’s work explores the idea that plants, as ancient ancestors of humans, can teach us how to adapt, change, protect ourselves, and look to our communities for support.

Harvey is a visual artist who works primarily in painting. Her current body of work consists of large, unstretched acrylic paintings on canvas that she makes on the floor using her body. The paintings examine human relationships with the natural world, impermanence, transformation, interconnectedness, and forces larger than ourselves.

Auditorium | 10:15-11:30  a.m.

How can we use our bodies to notice the environments changing around us? Genomic Gastronomy explores four projects that use food as a way to sense environmental disasters, including SMOG TASTING, which captures the atmospheric taste of place in meringue cookies, and WILDFIRE LOAF, which uses sourdough to investigate smoke-tainted wheat.  Moving between smog, wildfire, agriculture and other altered environments, the projects ask what becomes perceptible when environmental data is translated into smell, taste and touch. Rather than treating disasters as distant abstractions, these experiments invite us to encounter planetary change through the intimate scale of our own bodies.

Genomic Gastronomy is an artist-led think tank launched in 2010 by Cathrine Kramer and Zack Denfeld that examines the biotechnologies and biodiversity of human food systems. Their mission is to: map food controversies, prototype alternative culinary futures and imagine a more just, biodiverse & beautiful food system. They present their research on the organisms and environments manipulated by human food cultures through public lectures, research publications, meals, workshops and exhibitions. Since 2013, they have been joined by the artist Emma Conley and have collaborated with scientists, chefs, hackers and farmers in Europe, Asia, and North America. Working between and beyond the life sciences and food cultures, Genomic Gastronomy has been published in Science, Nature and Gastronomica and exhibited at the World Health Organization, Kew Gardens, V2_, MU, V&A Museum, Science Gallery, MIT Museum and others. They are currently based in Amsterdam and Porto.

Auditorium | 11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.

How can we protect cultural heritage during disasters and other emergencies? This session examines the growing risks facing art, artifacts, and collections, including those associated with climate change, and the tools conservators and communities use to prepare, respond, and recover.

Nicole Grabow is a cultural heritage conservator whose work focuses on community-led preservation and emergency preparedness and recovery. A trained objects conservator with more than 20 years of experience, including seven years as Director of Preventive Conservation at the Midwest Art Conservation Center, she now works as an independent consultant supporting preservation and collections care. She has a particular interest in Native American materials and in learning from communities caring for their own collections. She holds a Master of Science from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation and is a Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation.

12:30-1:30 p.m.

Food is available for purchase at MUSE and at on-site food trucks. Lunch is not included with admission. Complimentary coffee and other beverages are available. 

Auditorium | 1:30-2:30 p.m.

Climate-emergency preparedness often centers on adaptation and mitigation. Join Dr. Haley Mellin as she explores a pathway toward climate balance through large-scale land conservation and artist-developed practices that deepen awareness of the natural world. Forests absorb carbon dioxide and sustain living systems, making their protection both a practical and an ethical response to a warming planet. Mellin will share conservation work she has developed with peers in the arts community alongside artist projects rooted in respecting and protecting what is already here.

Mellin is an artist and land conservationist whose work bridges contemporary art and large-scale environmental protection. She founded Art into Acres, an environmental justice artwork that supports artists and Indigenous communities in the protection of biodiverse land. Mellin initiated the first carbon emissions calculations for museums such as The Met and exhibitions such as documenta. Her painting practice centers on observational painting in nature. Mellin holds a PhD in Visual Culture and Education, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Auditorium | 2:30-3:00 p.m.

Lessons From Newtok shares the experiences of youth from Newtok, Alaska, whose community was forced to relocate as thawing permafrost, erosion, and flooding rapidly changed the land. Through photography and writing, the students documented what it means to watch their home disappear, move to a new village, and adapt while maintaining their connection to culture and community. Now students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, they reflect on the ways telling their own stories has helped them find their voices and speak about a part of rural Alaska that few people know. Their work offers a personal perspective on displacement, resilience, and what it means to carry home with you when the land itself is changing.

Glennesha Carl is an environmental journalism student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She is originally from the village of Newtok in Southwest Alaska.

Daisy Carl is from the village of Newtok in Southwest Alaska. She grew up harvesting subsistence foods with her family. She is an undergraduate student at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

Katie Baldwin Basile is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and Alaska Sea Grant Coastal Resilience Specialist based in Bethel, Alaska. Her work centers on communities across the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, using photography, storytelling, and collaborative youth projects to explore environmental change, community resilience, and life in rural Alaska. She is a 2026 CatchLight Global Fellow and recipient of the 2026 Creative Capital State of the Art Prize.

Auditorium | 3-4 p.m. 

This panel is conceived as an open discussion offering pluralistic approaches to emergency and disaster preparedness. The panelists will engage in dialogue from different perspectives, including environmental and disaster ethics, relocation justice, eco-museum practices, regenerative heritage, food supply chains, land-based pedagogy, and lived experience. Daisy Carl and Glennesha Carl will join the conversation.

Dr. Stephanie Bauer specializes in bioethics, disaster ethics, professional ethics, public deliberation, and moral theory. She is conducting research on the fair allocation of medical resources to rural areas during the COVID-19 pandemic, the role of families in disasters, and methods of consent in survey research. She sits on Alaska Regional Hospital's ethics committee.

Dr. Raymond Anthony areas of specialization are bioethical analysis, practical philosophy, and applied ethics (especially environmental philosophy and the intersection of biomedical and public health, food, animal, agricultural, climate, and veterinary ethics), and the Philosophy of Technology. Currently, his research is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) and involves normative valuation of animal disease management preparedness and response through engagement with veterinarians, bioethicists, disaster management decision-makers and citizens.

Dr. Mike Jones is a Research Assistant Professor of Economics, Institute of Social and Economic Research, UAA.  He specializes in food supply chains, focusing on how transportation infrastructure, community remoteness, and seasonal conditions affect food delivery to rural and off-road communities. He studies how infrastructure disruptions, long supply chains, and extreme weather influence food availability, spoilage during transit, and the overall resilience of Alaska's retail food distribution system. 

Dr. Anjuli Grantham is a researcher, scholar, organizer and activist based in Juneau, Alaska. She is also a historian, curator, gardener, harvester, generous collaborator, and an instigator of multi-format arts, humanities, environment, and democracy projects. Her PhD research at Ulster University in Northern Ireland developed the concept of regenerative heritage, locating ways heritage enables a healthy web of life. She previously worked as the Curator of Statewide Services at the Alaska State Museum, and as the Curator of Collections and Exhibits at the Kodiak History Museum.

Dr. Aubyn O’Grady is an artist, researcher, and educator based in Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Territory, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. Her doctoral dissertation, Storying the Yukon School of Visual Arts with a Mediate-Ore (University of Toronto, 2023), produced the first critical history of a northern Canadian art school and has informed curricular shifts toward Indigenous worldviews and land-based pedagogy. O’Grady’s research-creation practice examines artist-led schools, extractive landscapes, and the ethics of site-specific and land-based artmaking in northern contexts. As co-lead of The Art of Mining Project, she has helped to develop “creative remediation” as a framework for placer mining reclamation, a model now shaping regional conversations around mining policy, design, and public art.  Collaboration is central to her practice. Her art practice requires frequent and enthusiastic collaborations, and the Dawson City League of Lady Wrestlers (2013–2017) became a nationally recognized performance project. O’Grady won the 2025 Yukon Arts Prize.

Auditorium | 4-4:15 p.m.

Join Quinn Christopherson for a live performance. Christopherson is an Ahtna and Inupiaq songwriter from Anchorage, Alaska, who won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2019 and has since toured across the U.S. and Canada. He released his debut album, Write Your Name in Pink, in 2022. Most recently, he co-wrote “Denali” with Portugal. The Man.

Art Lab | 4-5:30 p.m.

Join the Anchorage Museum Teen Climate Communicators in creating a community-sourced emergency blanket that reflects ideas of resilience and creativity. Contribute by decorating a fabric square with your thoughts and values, highlighting core principles of emergency preparedness, including understanding risks, making a plan, being a good neighbor, and getting involved. We will combine all contributions into an emergency-preparedness quilt, which will be featured in this year’s Teen Climate Communicators spring exhibition.

Please Don't Feed the Instruments

Thomas Planetarium | 4-4:45 p.m. 

A two-part, 30-minute multimedia exploration featuring salvaged electronics, radios, acoustic detritus, and synthesizers, weaving together moments of technological risk, environmental disruption, and unintended consequence. Our modern world runs on wires, waves, magnets, and transistors. How prepared are we for disruptions that originate beyond Earth—or from systems of our own making?

In 1859, the Carrington Event, the largest solar storm ever recorded, disrupted telegraph systems and produced auroras visible across much of the globe. In 1961, the U.S. Armed Forces and MIT launched Project West Ford, an experiment intended to create an artificial ionosphere using hundreds of millions of copper needles placed in orbit. By the time the project succeeded in 1963, communications satellites had already made the concept obsolete, while the experiment helped prompt international debate about space debris and the shared use of space.

Please Don't Feed the Instruments is an experimental music project by Anchorage-based sound artist Andrew Israelsen, who is also a member of the Anchorage Museum staff.

Co Lab | 4-5:30 p.m.

Join Anchorage Museum staff to learn about emergency preparedness supplies and make your own emergency supply kit to take home. Learn about shear-wall structural design and how it protects buildings during earthquakes while engaging in a hands-on engineering challenge.

Seed Lab | 4-5:30 p.m.

We rely on our clothing to protect us, share our identity with the world, and maintain our comfort, so when garments fail, we may experience the breakage in an intimate way. Do you know what to do in the face of this semi-mundane emergency? Join artists Jamie Hirano and Amy Meissner for a hands-on garment repair workshop focusing on the simple tools, techniques, and materials needed to lessen barriers associated with prolonging the life of your clothing. Learn the meditative skills of darning, hand patching, and which situation calls for which mend. We welcome socks with holes, so consider bringing one to care for in this group workshop.

Anchorage-based artist Amy Meissner combines handwork, found objects, and abandoned textiles to reveal narratives about the needle-based, physical, and emotional labor of women. Since 2019 she has taught clothing and textile repair as an act of prolonging, care, and accompaniment of vulnerable objects in transition.

Jamie Hirano is an Anchorage-based fiber and textile artist whose practice begins with the body and radiates outward into acts of making, gathering, and connection. Hirano learned to sew by wanting to make clothing fit, developing a creative practice rooted in textiles, clothing, and shared making. 

Everyday Anchorage, 4th floor | 5-6 p.m.

Duke Russell has lived and worked in Anchorage for more than five decades, chronicling the community through his artwork and connecting with residents. His artistic practice has evolved from drawings of neon signs and buildings to paintings that place people within the urban landscape. What began as providing meals from the back of his scooter has become a multi-person effort to distribute food and clothing across Anchorage. “Little things turn into big things,” he said. Among Russell’s paintings and Ward Wells’s photographs in the Museum exhibition Everyday Anchorage: Duke Russell & Ward Wells, attendees are invited to take a seat at the table and consider the importance of preparing a meal for a neighbor.

Duke Russell moved to Anchorage at age 12 and has called the Spenard neighborhood home for most of his adult life. A self-taught artist, he developed his technical skills through a career in film and theater. Inspired by Alaska’s history and the people who live here, his paintings often highlight overlooked or dismissed historical and contemporary stories. He also makes music, cooks, gardens, and works from his backyard studio, where he paints, builds sculptures and illustrates comic books

Alaska Gallery | 5-5:15 p.m.

This tour will take a close look at items in the Anchorage Museum’s Alaska exhibition to inspire conversations around the themes of preparedness, reaction to environmental shifts and disasters, and approaches to adaptation.