Alaska Humanities Forum Blog

The current issue of the Anchorage Press features a cover story on Portraits, a graphic novel depicting five stories of the lives and personal struggles of a diverse group of immigrants living in Alaska.

Portraits is the result of a partnership between the Alaska Humanities Forum’s Leadership Anchorage program, the Alaska Immigration Justice Project and the University of Alaska Anchorage Center for Community Engagement and Learning.

Tags: Media Coverage, Leadership Anchorage

“When Crab Was King,” an innovative exhibit featuring oral histories and photos from the Kodiak Island king crab fishery's storied heyday, closes June 1 after a monthlong run at the Baranov Museum. The exhibit will then be available online for the foreseeable future on the Kodiak Maritime Museum website.

The collection offer a fascinating look into what the fishery meant to Kodiak as seen through the fishermen, cannery workers, bartenders and other who lived through the island's greatest boom, which peaked in the mid-1960s and then gradually tapered off until the fishery was exhausted in 1982.

Tags: Grants

Last Saturday, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James Leach undertook a whirlwind tour of Anchorage. This included his graduation address at Alaska Pacific University, a breakfast meeting with Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell, viewing a private performance by Inupiaq rapper and storyteller Allison Warden and enjoying a guided tour of the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center. There his childlike enthusiasm matched that of the museum’s youngest visitors in viewing a mind-boggling Rube Golberg contraption within the Imaginarium Discovery Center.

“Marvelous,” exclaimed the 68-year-old NEH Chairman. “Wonderous.”

Tags: Untagged

A touring production of Time Immemorial, a play co-written by Yup’ik storyteller Jack Dalton and Inupiaq performance artist, playwright and rapper Allison Warden, winds up in Anchorage later this week with four shows at the Sydney Laurence Theater in collaboration with Out North Contemporary Art House.

Time Immemorial has garnered national acclaim since it was originally produced in 2009 at Cyrano’s Theatre Company in Anchorage as part of a program funded by the Alaska Humanities Forum.

Tags: Alaska Statehood Experience, Grants, Theatre

On a blue-sky day last August, a helicopter took off from Homer and flew northwest over Kachemak Bay. On board with the pilot were two photographers and Janet Klein, a longtime Alaskan and one familiar with the archaeology, history and culture of the Kachemak Bay region.

Funded by an Alaska Humanities Forum mini-grant, Klein had the helicopter for the better part of a day. Her goal was to document remote archaeological sites with aerial and ground photographs.

Tags: Grants, Archaeology