Description
Established in 1968, t h e A n c h o r a g e Mu s e u m i s Al aska’s l e a d i n g a r t , c u l tu re , hi s t or y a n d sc i e n ce mu s e u m, with o v e r 1 80 , 0 0 0 v i s i t or s annually. Alaska’s first American Alliance of Museums accredited museum, it also became th e f i r s t re gi o n al home to t h e Sm i th s o ni a n I n s t it u ti o n ’s National Museum of American History A r c ti c S tu d i e s C e nt er, and currently houses over 600 Alaska Native objects from Smithsonian collections. The museum’s mission centers on expanding perspectives on the North and its distinct environment, and engaging with Indigenous artists and communities.
In direct alignment with its mission, the museum seeks funding for Northern Cartographies: Reshaping Landscape , a major collection-based exhibition (May 2021) to be accompanied by a set of publications, public programs, and artists’ residencies. The project will interrogate methods of mapping, and how borders and boundaries shape our perception and understanding of landscape. The project will foreground the role of artists in documenting Northern and Arctic landscapes over the course of 150 years, and the unanticipated role of their works as records of places now being altered by climate change. The exhibition will also feature traditional Indigenous mapping practices, including hand-drawn maps and oral narratives that demonstrate a deep and detailed understanding the land, and contemporary Indigenous modes of mapping as critical responses to colonialism, climate change, and protected land status. The exhibition will seek to stimulate conversations about vision, memory, and imagining landscapes of the future.
The curatorial team will select works that highlight distinctive Northern features, such as glaciers, mountains, forests, and coastlines, and the lifeways they accommodated. Works will range from historical and contemporary landscape paintings and photographs, to baskets, masks, carvings, and maps from the Museum’s archival collection. There will also be examples of new media, including sound ecology recordings and video. The exhibition will place dozens of collection works on view and in conversation with objects featured in the Luce-funded Art of the North permanent collection galleries. Collection works will be supplemented by archival, hand-drawn maps from the collection of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In addition to an accompanying exhibition catalogue, project plans include a series of creative publications on art and cartography. A series of residencies (funded by other sources) will allow artists to respond to works in the collection and to make selections for adjacent, smaller installations. Resident writers will contribute to a Cartographies edition of the museum’s Chatter Marks journal, which will feature both images and writing about the exhibition. A full menu of public programs will include interdisciplinary lectures, discussions, films, and activities.
Proposed grant funds would support all facets of the project except the artist’s residencies. The exhibition has the potential to travel to other venues.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a two-year grant of $200,000 to the Anchorage Museum for the collection-based exhibition, Northern Cartographies: Reshaping Landscape .