Keeping Up with Contemporary Art in Alaska

It’s hard enough to keep up with what’s going on in contemporary art in Alaska when you live there. In the course of several years of living in Juneau and 24 years of living in Fairbanks, I kept up with what was going on the in the larger Alaskan art community by involving myself in that statewide community—serving on local, regional, and state arts councils, going to conferences, visiting galleries and museums and other artists’ studios when I traveled,…every way I could, firsthand. But on a week-to-week basis, I also kept up through reading at first both Anchorage papers—the Anchorage Times and the Anchorage Daily News, and after the demise of the Times—which had some terrific arts writers in the 1970s and early 1980s—just the Daily News. Every Sunday at least, and often other days, I would buy the Anchorage paper and not only read, but cut out and file articles about Alaskan art and artists.

I’d also subscribe to newsletters, pick up catalogs and brochures and handouts in galleries, save articles from airline inflight magazines, and everything else I could find. After almost three decades in Alaska, I have 5 file cabinets full of files on more than 4000 artists who have worked in Alaska or other parts of the circumpolar North. Now that we’ve moved Outside, the prospect of those files’ getting more and more dated and out of touch with current reality is a very unattractive one for me. How can I avoid it?

Well, I will be back in Alaska regularly and will probably go to as many exhibitions and meetings in Anchorage and Juneau as I did in the years I lived in Fairbanks, so I’ll still have plenty of ongoiong, firsthand experience. But thanks to the wonders of the internet, I and others living outside Anchorage can also keep up on a weekly, even daily basis remarkably well. I thought I’d share here a few ways that we can all better keep up with what’s going on in Alaskan art. These are just the sources that come most immediately to mind, and I’m sure as soon as I post this, I’ll think of half a dozen more.

The source I still find most fruitful is the Anchorage Daily News. A wide variety of writers, from Mike Dunham, whose articles on the arts in Alaska I have appreciated for years, to relative newcomers like Mark Baechtel, who seems to me to have brought new energy and a fresh look at the visual arts community to the newspaper’s pages, not only write reviews, but raise and discuss contemporary issues in the arts community. Dawnell Smith’s regular reviews, as well as pieces by articulate, insightful artists in the community profile artists and issues. Just in the last month, prominent photographer Hal Gage and artist/critic/writer Wanda Seamster have contributed excellent, thought-provoking pieces. I still miss Wanda’s Vizual Dog publication, which featured some of the most provocative, thoughtful, original writing on contemporary arts issues we’ve ever had in Alaska.

I check for arts articles in the Daily News almost every day, at www.adn.com, and if I miss a few days when I’m traveling and don’t have internet access, I go when I return to www.adn.com/life/arts, and the arts articles from the last month or so are available online in their entirety, even including their accompanying photos.

It’s possible to get a few other articles from the online versions of the newspapers in Alaska’s smaller communities, but they are not nearly so frequent, are often not included in the online versions of the paper, and even when they are, they are not often archived, or are not available for viewing without paying hefty fees for archived articles. I read art articles in the Juneau Empire, for instance, but I have to remember to look for them on Friday, when they appear. And it seems to me a great shame that the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner doesn’t, so far as I have been able to find, include arts articles from their Thursday arts page among the selected articles in their online edition at all.

Another source available outside Anchorage via the internet is Don Ricker’s ArtSceneAK. Don’s online publication, viewable at www.artsceneak.com, is a very personal, highly idiosyncratic monthly look at current exhibitions, arts community developments, and issues. I often disagree with his take on things, but I am always eager to read each new issue, and I appreciate enormously not only the time and energy he puts into it, but the boldness with which he takes on every issue.

As far as I know, those are the primary online periodical sources. The Alaska State Council on the Arts has an excellent website at www.educ.state.ak.us/aksca, including electronic access to the guidelines and applications for all its grants programs, news and opportunities, access to its newsletter, and much more, but it doesn’t feature reviews or discuss issues and events as they happen. That’s not its function.

Much the same is true of the excellent websites of the Anchorage Museum and University of Alaska Museum, though they and the Alaska State Museum, in Juneau, provide access to information on exhibitions and a look—to varying extents--at works in their collections. Another day, I’ll talk about the way a couple of those museums are making extensive portions of their visual art collections available for viewing online.

The Alaska State Museum website does provide a truly wonderful feature—online views of some of their solo exhibitions and other temporary exhibits, including links to artists’ websites, essays on the work, and more. If you haven’t taken a look at their site, at , take a few minutes and go there. It’s terrific.

Then there’s the Museums Alaska website (www.museumsalaska.org), which has links to the websites of most other Alaska museums. And…well, already I can think of more, but that’s enough for today. I would be delighted to hear from anyone about other online newsletters, periodicals, and sources of any kind to keep up from afar, and I’ll pass them along on this site.

Kes Woodward
ffkew@uaf.edu
www.keslerwoodward.com

Comments

[Donald R Ricker]

prof kesler:

thanks for the good word about ArtSceneAK. the URL is .net now rather than .com, which I lost back in the day. the reviews are linked to from the top page of my current website. http://artsceneak.net

[kc crowley]

Mr. Woodward,
The Anchorage press also has decent arts coverage, though not close to Mr. Dunham's caliber. They do have excellent first friday maps and provide a lot of exposure to begging artists like myself. By the way, I was absolutely floored by the works in the Pratt museum. Amazing stuff.

Thank you,
kc
www.mythinkworks.com