The Anchorage Museum

The Anchorage Museum is a multi-faceted, multi-media home of Alaska’s history, natural wonders and artwork telling the story of the nation’s 49th state. The museum’s doors hold an account of a landscape largely untouched, yet forever altered by human occupation. The images and presentations are of the unfamiliar and familiar made foreign by an arctic prism casting an otherworldly light. Bathed in those hues, interpretations take form and messages are relayed from a living land to a transient occupant of Alaskan soil and the museum’s walls.

One of the most striking features of Alaska is the light. Prominent as the days grow short, the aurora borealis are famed the world over as an atmospheric phenomenon casting a watchful eye over a darkened wintery world. In “The Northern Lights” Sidney Laurence captured them on a canvas of dark features exhaling the glow for all to see as if god had just murmured, “let there be light.”



Into that light the mountains and rivers of Alaska awaken as if in a dream state. The colors, unreal to the lower 48 states, but are captured beautifully by native Athabascan artists Kathleen Carlo-Kendall with her landscape portrait sculpture, “Break of Day”.



With physical features awash in an abstract light, artists are obviously easily inspired. Even in the absence of the light, the wilds of Alaska are so striking they alone carry the feel of the abstract as Kesler Woodward displays in the painting “No wind, Fairbanks snow”.



Even the truer to life medium of photography buckles under the immense beauty of Alaska. Pioneering aerial photographer Bradford Washburn continuously exhibited the haunting properties of the state with his collection of Alaskan photographs.



Of course none of these works of art could have been presented without habitation of the land. Human occupation of Alaska is a major focus of the art in the Anchorage Museum. The forces at work affect us and we leave lasting reminders of our presence, as the photographs of the World War II battleground shows. The images of Kiska are particularly poignant considering it is an unspoiled battleground; the Aleutian island was unoccupied prior to the war and has been since the end of WWII.



The human affects on the land is now a constant source of inspiration for Alaskan artists such as Da-ka-xeen Mehner’s “My Right of Way, Summer”, a meditation on bushels of wild blueberries being replaced by bushels of industrial junk.



While there is profound impact humanity is having here and all across the globe, the Alaskan geography is becoming part of the collective soul as well. The painting, “Anchorage, 4th Avenue” by Spence Guerin interprets the unique color palette Alaska imparts on the Alaskan cityscape and its inhabitants.



The human race is becoming absorbed into the landscape. One of Tlingit artist James Robert Shoppert’s paintings blends the mountains and the human form into something of a mountainous Totum, “Punuk”.

Everything is blending; a tribal dance of the past and future attracts and casts out evil. It is all alive and moving to the Alaskan rhythm, swaying like Stron Softi’s video instillation, “Ketchikan”.