How Juneau, Alaska, Is Becoming an Epicenter for Indigenous Art

When it comes to art capitals, Rome, New York, Paris and Berlin are a few of the global hot spots that come to mind. However, if the city of Juneau, Alaska, has any say in the matter, it could very well earn a coveted spot on the list.

A community-wide effort began in Juneau in late 2017, when Sealaska Heritage Institute , a private nonprofit that promotes cultural diversity through the arts and public services, announced its plans to make “Juneau the Northwest Coast arts capital of the world.” They'd meet this goal through the promotion and support of several Indigenous cultures that are strongly interwoven into the fabric of the region, and whose works exemplify this artistic style. By definition, Northwest Coast art is recognizable by its usage of “formline designs,” according to The Canadian Encyclopedia , or “the continuous, flowing, curvilinear lines that turn, swell and diminish in a prescribed manner.” The term was coined by art historian and author Bill Holm in his 1965 book Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. Indigenous artists—particularly the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples, all of whom call Juneau and the surrounding Southeast Alaska area home—apply this style of art in everything from drawings and paintings to sculptures and weavings. As a steward of the arts, Sealaska Heritage aims to “perpetuate and enhance” the cultures of these groups, and in the three years since its announcement, the nonprofit, along with members of the local arts community, have inched closer and closer towards their collective goal to become a globally recognized hotspot for the arts.

“Our hope is to make Juneau a destination for art lovers,” says Rosita Worl, president of Sealaska Heritage. “Art is everywhere in our community and it’s a reflection of our culture. We want to share our passion for [Northwest Coast art], this great and unique art form, on a wider scale.”

As the capital city of Alaska, Juneau is already recognized as the governmental backbone of the state. Its skyline is dotted with local, state and federal buildings; the Alaska State Capitol, a hulking, marble-pillared structure fills up an entire city block. However, a closer look at Juneau reveals a city populated by art museums, galleries, murals and statues promoting the artistic endeavors of local artists. Public art can be seen all over the city, from the Old Witch totem pole created by Haida carver Dwight Wallace in 1880 that creeps up the side of the State Office Building to the “Raven Discovering Mankind in a Clam Shell" mural by painter Bill Ray, Jr. located on the side of the City Municipal Building. Juneau also plays host to a lively calendar of events (in normal years) that includes Celebration , a four-day gathering of Indigenous peoples (one of the largest in the world) filled with traditional music and dance in June, and the weeklong Alaska Folk Festival every June. Another popular event is First Friday , when downtown galleries and businesses extend their hours on the first Friday of every month.

One of the first steps Sealaska Heritage took to reach its goal occurred in 2015, when it opened phase one of its Sealaska Heritage Arts Campus . Known as the Walter Soboleff Building, it's located several blocks south of the capitol building and houses a number of different examples of Indigenous art, from bronze house posts to the largest glass screen in the world, a piece by Tlingit artist Preston Singletary that measures 17 feet by 12 feet. Sealaska Heritage is currently on schedule to complete the project’s second phase by next fall. (After the completion of this phase, work will likely begin on Sealaska Heritage's next project, a totem pole trail comprised of 30 totem poles.)

Once complete, the 6,000-square-foot campus will be comprised of both indoor and outdoor spaces that are designed for artists to create different mediums of Northwest Coast art, both on a small and “monumental scale,” the latter of which will include totem poles and canoes. Classrooms, a library and a space dedicated to hosting various public events, such as live performances and a Native art market, will round out the site. Sealaska Heritage also plans to offer both credit and non-credit art classes in partnership with the University of Alaska Southeast and the Institute of American Indian Arts, a college based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“The art campus will expand opportunities for Alaska Native and Northwest Coast artists to perpetuate the ancient art practices of the Indigenous culture of the area and help educate the public about the continued evolution of these traditions,” Worl says. “It will be a community center where people can come and see great art and artists at work.”

Lily Hope, a Juneau native known for her colorful and intricate weavings that have been on display at the Alaska State Museum, Portland Art Museum and the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle, is hopeful that Juneau’s Indigenous art scene will get the recognition that it deserves. As a member of the Tlingit people, she has been weaving since she was 14 years old, when her late mother taught her the craft. Now 40, Hope continues their legacy by weaving arm bands, face masks and jewelry using techniques she mastered while working alongside her mother for many years. Hope also serves as the president and co-founder of Spirit Uprising , a nonprofit “dedicated to preserving the integrity of Ravenstail and Chilkat weaving by promoting excellence, educating students and supporting weaver communities internationally.”

“We have a pretty vibrant arts network here along the Southeast Alaska coast,” Hope says. “I’m enjoying being a part of this continued revitalization and reinvigoration of the local Indigenous arts [scene]. The community of artists here is close, and we’re always talking and sending each other information and kicking each other in the pants to continue creating our art.”

Kelly McHugh, collections manager for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., says that the museum has worked closely with Sealaska over the years in different capacities, including loaning art for different exhibitions. She says that Sealaska's drive to make Juneau the Northwest Coasts art capital is an “exciting prospect.”

“Sealaska is an important force when it comes to cultures of the Northwest Coast,” McHugh says. “What I really respect about what [Sealaska] is doing is that they're continuing to support living artists, and the intiative they're embarking on shows a real commitment to contemporary artists and their culture. I think the ripple effect of having this epicenter of living culture that is so supported and vibrant and happening in such a positive way, [is that] it will have an effect on Juneau and then Alaska and then the United States. It's showing a real commitment and validation [of Northwest Coast art].”

One of the most important outcomes of promoting and supporting local Indigenous artists is to ensure that their crafts continue to be passed along from one generation to the next, just as Hope learned her craft from her own mother.

“Our focus is on art forms that were starting to become extinct,” Worl says. “We want Northwest Coast art to be recognizable and to be everywhere. We’re working with our local congressional district to try to get it to become a designated national treasure [much like jazz music’s designation in 1987]. We’re always looking for places downtown for artists to create new murals; we want art everywhere in our community, from street signs around Juneau to pieces on street corners. When people visit Juneau, we want them to be excited about our art.”

A Globe-Trotting, Truth-Seeking Art Project Looks for Answers in D.C.

How do you define the truth? Artists in the Cause Collective weren’t sure—so they decided to trek all over the world and ask as many people as possible.

Over the better part of a decade, the group has traveled across the globe with their portable “Truth Booth,” an inflatable speech bubble that encases a miniature recording studio. They’ve collected thousands of answers to a seemingly simple prompt: “The truth is…”

What they’ve found is that the truth can be many things, says artist Jim Ricks, one of the project’s creators. Sometimes it means direct reflections on politics or free speech ; other times, it’s an Afghan girl championing education , a woman forgiving her mother or a young Californian drawing attention to the drought (and his hatred of applesauce) .

Now, In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth) has arrived in the nation’s capital, where fact and fiction are often hotly debated. The installation will be parked on the Hirshhorn Museum’s outdoor plaza overlooking the National Mall from June 8 until June 23, inviting D.C. locals and visitors to come share their stories.

“I think it's important that the booth be here. This place has resonance and meaning,” says Jorge Sanchez, an adviser on The Truth Booth project. “To be a few feet away from the National Mall—a place where political things get decided, and people have had rallies that have been historic. For me, the truth is very personal, and yet it is also so politically powerful.”

The booth fits into the Hirshhorn’s current exhibition, “ Manifesto: Art x Agency ,” which examines how artists have engaged with political and social issues throughout history. As part of the exhibition, the Cause Collective will also be presenting a documentary on their recent tour through Mexico and highlighting a selection of videos from participants there.

Kevin Hull, the director of public engagement at the Hirshhorn, says his team envisioned the installation as a way to let visitors create their own personal manifestos like the art historical ones displayed in the rest of the exhibition. With its prominent location facing the mall, he says the booth has been an attention-grabber since the moment it was inflated; so far, he estimates the booth has seen around 300 people recording videos every day, with many more stopping by just to take a picture in front of it.

“For some people, a modern art museum can be an intimidating place,” Hull says. “We are always looking for ways to give people a chance to be active participants in what they’re looking at. Ultimately, we want people to see themselves as artists, or as creative citizens.”

According to Ricks, the “nascent idea” for The Truth Booth was born out of a couple earlier projects by the Cause Collective—a group of artists, designers and ethnographers creating public art projects. In 2008, the team presented statements on the truth in different languages for an installation at the University of California, San Francisco , and started thinking about how hard it was to directly translate the truth. For another project, the team was tasked with creating a “portrait of a city” for Oakland, California , and decided to compile short video snippets of Bay Area residents—much like the “self portraits” created in The Truth Booth , Sanchez says.

From those starting points, the Collective created In Search of the Truth (The Truth Booth) , which they first presented in 2011 at an arts festival in Galway, Ireland. The design is straightforward: a white blowup speech bubble, cleanly outlined in black, with “TRUTH” marked out in all caps. Rather than feature one artist’s particular style, the team leaned into the more universal language of advertising, Ricks says.

“We wanted to really make it accessible and popular,” he says. “So it serves as a huge billboard—‘Speak the truth’—and maybe draws you to this more intimate, more personal exchange.”

The interior of the booth is a small and sparsely decorated space, almost like a confessional booth, Sanchez says. As participants record their clips, they’re watching themselves on the screen in real time. Something about the intimacy of being alone, looking into a virtual mirror, almost makes it feel like you’re talking to yourself and tends to bring out some deeply introspective answers, Ricks explains.

From Galway, the team made it their goal to cross the world in search of different perspectives. Since their initial tour of Ireland, they’ve brought The Truth Booth to Australia, Afghanistan, South Africa and more than 30 cities across the United States. Most recently, they loosely followed the routes of migrants making their way toward the U.S. in a tour that began in southern Mexico, journeyed up through the border in El Paso and ended in Los Angeles.

Though there are trends that show up in “truths” collected at specific places or moments—many participants in Mexico spoke on the realities of the immigration crisis, for example, and during the U.S. election in 2016 lots of videos had a political spin —Sanchez says he’s also been interested to discover links between truths that are distant in space and time.

“There's a ‘eureka’ moment when I see a truth that was taken in Australia, and a truth that was maybe taken in Alabama, and they mirror each other, or they contradict each other, but there's certainly dialogue between these truths of two people who may never ever meet,” Sanchez says. “So there's a kind of magic to the truth.”

Even when the tours are planned out to tell a specific story, like the migratory journey through Mexico, Ricks says he likes to leave some room for impromptu stops. Luckily, the booth was designed to be portable; although it takes a little elbow grease to break it down, the entire setup can be compressed into a manageable bundle. (Sanchez likes to refer to the process—which consists of “deflating the truth,” folding it like a burrito and then rolling it up like a sleeping bag—as the “closing ceremony” for each site.)

And just a little bit of distance can transform the way people interpret and react to the booth: Sanchez recalls how the project became a political “raised fist” at one spot right on the U.S.-Mexico border as patrol agents constantly drove past the site, while a few miles down the road, when they set up in a baseball diamond in a working-class Mexican community, the focus became all about kids playing and people going about their daily lives.

The team still has a lot of ground to cover for a truly global perspective, Ricks says. They’re heading back to Australia in the fall and later have plans to visit St. Louis, with a potential stop in Ferguson, Missouri, five years after protests erupted there over the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown .

While he set out expecting more of the truths to involve people’s takes on current events, Ricks says he’s been surprised by the wide range of responses. He says he hopes the booth provides a space that can empower people in speaking their own truths, whatever they may be.

“So many people often ask, you know, ‘I don't have anything good to say, what's a good truth?’ A good truth is an original one,” Ricks says. “You can tell when people are being truthful, no matter what language they're speaking. You can see it in their eyes.”

This Ink Is Made From Air Pollution

On a trip to India in 2012, Anirudh Sharma captured a photo of a diesel generator blowing black soot against a white wall. That dark, triangular stain made Sharma, who was then a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, think seriously about pollution—and also about pigments, like ink.

The black ink we use in our pens or in inkjet printers is essentially made from soot. The technical term for the substance is “ carbon black ,” and it is the powder that remains after burning coal or oil. The powder is mixed with a polymer and a solvent to turn it into smooth, flowing black rollerball ink.

“So, if you can do it with soot, can we do the same with air pollution?” Sharma explains. “The black color in the pen you use is made by burning fossil fuels to make ink. But you shouldn’t need to burn new fossil fuels just to make ink. Fossil fuels are already being burned.”

If he could find a way, he thought, to capture the particles that produced that stain on the wall in his photograph, he could not only reduce the amount of pollution released into the air, but also turn it into something new, or perhaps something beautiful.

“Ink is such a powerful medium to connect with people. A book has black ink. In art, you use black ink. Fashion and textiles use black ink,” says Sharma. He reflects on a quote from 20th century inventor and architect R. Buckminster Fuller: "Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value."

In 2013, Sharma and a few friends “hacked” an inkjet printer cartridge to print using ink made from soot from a candle at the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. A year later, following the completion of his master's degree at MIT, Sharma returned to India to focus fully on developing what would become a product called AIR-INK, the first commercial ink made entirely from air pollution. It started as a small proof of concept experiment using soot from air pollution to make paint. When it worked, he and his team built a lab in a small garage in Bangalore to create a device that could capture air pollution at the source, in engines or factory machinery. In the six months they spent in India refining their technology, it wasn’t hard to find pollution sources for experimenting.

Sharma explains that in Western countries, like the United States, stricter regulations already require companies to dispose of carbon particulates responsibly. However, in places like India where regulations are more relaxed, waste builds up quickly at small to medium-size businesses because it can be expensive to dispose. Without systems in place to get rid of the waste, plenty will end up in landfills or even rivers, Sharma explains. They put a call out to area factories asking for their carbon particulates, and it wasn’t long before polluters started contacting him to collect their waste.

“They started coming to us and asking to send it to us because we were making something people can buy,” Sharma says. “People started seeing AIR-INK as an opportunity to get rid of their waste, so it doesn’t end up in a landfill.”

They first developed a filtering device called Kaalink , derived from the Hindi word “kaala” meaning black, that was comprised of a steel cylinder that could be affixed to an exhaust pipe. Now, Kaalink can by scaled up to filter air pollution from just about any source, like a smokestack on small machinery or even straight out of the air, and turn it into soot, which is then hydrated to form ink that can be used in AIR-INK pens and markers. Each marker holds about 30 milliliters of AIR-INK, which is equivalent to approximately 45 minutes of diesel car pollution.

Sharma and his team started his company Graviky Labs , which handles operations for both Kaalink and AIR-INK. When it came time to start sharing the product with the rest of the world, Sharma knew he wanted to start with artists . In 2016, he paired up with the Singapore-based brewery Tiger Beer to create street art and murals using AIR-INK in Hong Kong's Sheung Wan district.

“Art wasn’t the way to make money for us — it was the way for us to build a community. They [artists] take this idea beyond the science and the impact,” he explains.

As artists realized that AIR-INK pens produced high-quality, long-lasting, deeply-pigmented, non-toxic pigment using recycled material, word spread fast.

Now, Sharma’s AIR-INK is on display at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, in the exhibition “ Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial ” co-organized with the Cube design museum in Kerkrade, Netherlands. The 60-plus sustainable design-focused projects featured in the show, which runs through January 20, 2020, are organized into seven sections representing the different ways designers interact with nature: Understand, Simulate, Salvage, Facilitate, Augment, Remediate and Nurture.

AIR-INK will be displayed in the “Salvage” section. Artist Ellen Lupton, a senior curator at Cooper Hewitt, used AIR-INK markers to stencil part of the exhibition’s message on reclaimed wood and other recycled material. She says she was surprised by the marker’s “superior qualities” as an art product, noting that the ink is super black, withstands prolonged use, holds up on a variety of surfaces and mediums, and won’t bleed through paper or dry out quickly.

“I was surprised at how functional the product is. It’s an incredible notion that you can turn pollution into ink. I didn’t think it would be so fun to use,” she says. “And it makes you think, if these particles are in the air and they’re that pigmented, it’s chilling.”

One of the show’s curators, Caitlin Condell of Cooper Hewitt, explains that designers are increasingly becoming environmentally conscious, whether it’s in rethinking how they source material for their work or the function and impact of the final product.

“The show is responsive to the moment we currently live and shows how designers are thinking about our relationship with nature and the planet,” Condell explains. Other pieces include vessels made from repurposed plastic waste harvested from the ocean, fashion inspired by biomimicry, living bamboo architecture, and more.

As for Sharma and AIR-INK, the focus is expansion to an industrial scale. The inventor would like AIR-INK to be used in practical applications, like in inkjet printers in offices, newsprint, textbooks, or textile printing in the fashion industry.

“We've set up industries for our comfort, but the environment has to bear the price of it,” Sharma explains, adding that AIR-INK isn’t a silver bullet solution to the world's pollution problem. “It’s a start, and it can inspire several others to start looking at new forms of waste that are lying outside, unutilized.”