A Critic’s Stroll: Anchorage Museum – How to Survive
By Colin A. Warren
For many years, I’ve wanted to visit the Anchorage Museum. This desire was increased significantly several years ago when I heard an interview on Alaska News Nightly with the visiting ambassador from France in which he gave a rave review of the museum. If the French are experts in anything besides food, surely it’s museums and art, no? Well, over the winter break, I had a couple of days in Anchorage, so, on a gloomy and chilly Tuesday, I made my first visit.
The well-landscaped yard was covered in wet snow, and the leafless trees sang the winter blues. Yet when I opened the entrance doors, I was greeted with an almost harsh abundance of mango-yellow, which covered the entire large wall behind the ticket desk. At first, I was mildly offended by the choice of color, but then I thought of the friendliness of school buses and the carefree summertime feeling of dandelions, and I softened to the aesthetic choice. Pleased, as always, to be granted a discount for being a student, I took my ticket and headed for the stairs. (At the time of my visit to the Anchorage Museum, they were offering free admission for Alaska Natives; the program was short-lived after blowback concerning the 14th Amendment.) As I ascended, I took note of the staircase being encased by walls made of many very tall and thin pieces of wood. It was redolent of both being in an abstract forest and a Scandinavian furniture store simultaneously.
I eventually reached the third floor and was met by a large weave that made the word SURVIVE out of many broken climbing ropes. Although I was enthusiastic to see the entire museum, I came specifically for this exhibit: “How to Survive” (on display until January 2025). The premise is this: We Alaskans are facing climate change at a rate four times faster than most of the human-inhabited earth. Therefore, we need to think more than most about what causes it and how to coordinate to fight it. “The only way to survive is by taking care of one another,” is the quote from Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American activist and philosopher, that fittingly serves as the headline to the exhibit descriptor online.
Over and over again, there were messages of community and resilience in the show. I feel that this communal nature comes easier to us than many Americans because the vast and harsh nature here will kill us if we don’t work together, especially when we’re in a pinch. And climate change will make those pinches occur with more and more regularity.
After gazing at the weaved SURVIVE sign for a bit, I turned around and inspected what, at first glance, looked like a store of Alaska Native products. But it was just a display of fascinating objects, none for sale. There was the always impressive animal gut kuspuk, an invention that would be bio-mimicked by GoreTex. And beside it, a child’s parka made of flour sacks and fur, which emphasized the use-what-you-have ethos of people who often live far from stores or post offices. That same ethos was on display with a harpoon, which, instead of a traditional float that would have been made from the stomach of a seal, had an empty Chevron oil bottle attached to the end of the weapon. My favorite of these forms of Alaskan Native ingenuity was the snow goggles made of ivory, baleen, and hide; with two thin slits across the front of them, they minimized refractory light from being blinding when facing the endless snowy tundra, and they looked way cooler than Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles.
Turning to the next room, I was greeted by a sort of library, a wooden sculpture representing the arcs of a tide chart designed by Mary Mattingly. The sculpture was not that aesthetically groundbreaking. It was fine. What was wonderful was the fact Mattingly worked with dozens of artists to employ all the senses to “get in touch with and learn from waterways.” There was the purl of water in audio snippets in headphones. There was a wide array of books that didn’t just deal with water but rather expansively included the topics of botany, philosophy, geology, mental health, climate anxiety, and more. Hi-def nature photos hung from the ceiling, and ferns popped out of slats. A person could get lost in this faux-riparian education scene for hours.
Since it was a Tuesday afternoon, the exhibit was overwhelmingly quiet, and I was thankful for that. There is profound serenity in the sole sound of one’s footsteps within halls constructed for deep thinking. As I entered the adjoining room, I immediately recognized the featured artist’s work (from the brochure to this exhibit) because I’ve followed her on Instagram for years. Amy Meissner is an Anchorage artist and a staple of town. When she’s not creating thought-provoking oddities like those on display at the exhibit (full body suits made of Tyvek and quilts that would look at home in the post-apocalypse, or perhaps at the Glastonbury Festival), she hosts classes about how to darn and/or repair used clothing. She’s equal measures practical and creative, and her humble sensibility glowed on display.
Meissner’s pieces and photos were set up beside a Hawaiian artist, Gaye Chan’s, weaving project. Anyone who works a construction job or just goes to the hardware store knows her material: baling straps. They’re the extremely strong plastic bands that keep things wrapped up tight. But their usage doesn’t end in the construction world. They’re used in basically all worldwide shipping endeavors. And since almost all our goods here in Alaska are shipped to us, you bet our landfills also see plenty of these straps. Chan figured out how to weave pretty swanky-looking bags and purses from these baling straps. Of course, making purses out of this waste product won’t save heaps of the stuff going into our garbage piles, but the idea here is to shift the paradigm, to get people to think about the waste and, on top of it, create liminal space from that waste.
As I moved on through the exhibit, I considered what the Anchorage Museum Chief Curator, Fran DuBrock, shared with me regarding the sustainable ethos of the exhibit. As part of limiting the waste, they decided to use the same layout of the previous exhibit that was shown there (save one single wall). They also sought to greatly reduce the carbon footprint of the exhibit by working with the artists over the Internet instead of having them fly themselves and/or ship their works to the museum.
DuBrock stated in an interview with KTUU: “...the art industry has a carbon footprint equal to the country of Austria.” Besides keeping the exhibit's layout the same, they kept shipping and travel for it to a minimum. Chan, the Hawaiian weaver, never set foot in Alaska but rather shared her ideas and concepts with the team at the Anchorage Museum, and they set it up. They also did this remote artist installation creation/enabling with LA artist Carolina Caycedo. While such a creative relationship made much more work for the museum staff, it greatly limited the exhibit’s carbon footprint.
Caycedo specializes in sculptures, videos, and performances that examine environmental and social issues. Her series within the Survive exhibit was titled Cosmotarraya. Upon first viewing, the main sculpture looks slightly more than a fisherman’s full gear set, all terribly tangled and then hung from the ceiling. But Cayecedo dreamed of such an array to speak to northern people's deep connection to fish. The museum team sourced most of the fishing stuff from the nearby area. Caycedo expressed that the nets in the sculpture “represent a combination of porousness and strength, reflecting the inherent connectivity among beings.” Whether Caycedo’s abstract jumble speaks for the observer or not, the relationship between fish and human, river and life, is certainly at the front of many Alaskan’s minds these days as we enter a possible fifth year in a row that salmon counts are so low on the Yukon River that Fish and Game severely limit or close the river to fishing, even subsistence.
Photos by Colin A. Warren
As I circled Caycedo’s fishy sculptures and verdant murals, my attention was snagged by seeing my neighbor in McCarthy on a television screen. Jeremey Pataky seems ubiquitous on the Alaskan writing scene; he’s got his press, he edits for Alaska’s Edible, and he’s a fine poet. And there he was, flashing across the TV in the museum. I slipped some headphones on and listened to him read his own words:
“The creeks around my cabin flow into the Kennicott River downstream, which joins the Nizina, one of many that flow into the Chitina, a tributary of the Copper, which links us to the Pacific. The vast majority of global glacier ice mass loss comes from inland glaciers like those around here. Their melt contributes a lot to rising seas. The longer I live beside these melting glaciers, the less remote this home feels. Even as I watch it change, though, I still feel sustained by how beautiful it can be. I’m heartened when visitors gain first-hand experience of large glaciers. There’s hope in the aha when someone sees a river rise when summer days get hot, a visible sign of accelerated melt. The place plants moments like seeds in us, little germs of understanding about consequence, and what’s at stake, and how tangible our collective impact has been, and what it could be.”
Pataky was participating in the Community Climate Archive portion of the exhibit. Alaskans were asked to answer one of several questions regarding their direct interaction with and response to climate change. Their answers were accompanied by photos and videos of our picturesque state from many angles and perspectives. It brought a much-needed grounding to reality when positioned beside the abstract works of Caycedo.
As I removed the headphones, I heard the crystal-like tinkle of children laughing. This alerted me because it was the first other human that I’d heard while in the exhibit. I stuck my head around the corner to investigate and saw a wild, Seussian-esque sculpture in front of which stood two young girls dressed in gowns suited for a Disney film or a quinceañera. I wondered what Meissner’s take on their outfit patched together out of Value Village thrifts might look like. It felt odd that they weren’t accompanied by an adult, but they seemed at ease, whispering to one another and cackling a bit. Then they looked at each other and said, “Ready? Action!!” They ran straight for a black curtain that served as a room divider and jumped through to the other side. An older man with a sizable belly and a thick gray beard that hung down his belt sauntered in. He looked like he’d be right at home riding a bike at Sturgis or playing Father Time on Broadway. He slid his spectacles down his nose and looked at me.
“It’s their world, I just live in it.”