Best Local Artist


The little doll parts that seem to have sprouted legs of pewter attracted attention last year and might have made Alex Phillips the Press Picks' favorite local artist. This is the second year in a row that she's won our Press Picks poll; this year, maybe it was the tiny boxes with found photos and objects mounted in them at the Battery Gallery. Phillips emerged a few years back by hanging a series of marionettes on the walls at Kaladi Brothers' large South Anchorage coffee shop. One of her marionettes is now a part of the permanent collection at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art.

Alex Phillips’ tangled strings
by Rachel McLellen

August 31 - September 6, 2000 / Vol. 9, Ed. 35

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Alex Phillips, 23, grew up in Anchorage with a German mother, an English father and a Czech puppet with human hair. Phillips was scared of the puppet as a little girl, and dusted it religiously, hoping it would be nice to her if she kept it clean. But the fears of her childhood translated to interest in marionettes as she grew older, and she began making her own ghoulish puppets when she was 19. After five years as a puppet maker, Phillips will have an opening reception for her second show of puppets, titled “Tangled Strings,” at Snow City Cafe on Friday, September 1. Phillips says her marionettes, many of which hang like stalactites from the ceiling of her Turnagain apartment, are more like sculptures than functioning puppets. While pulling their strings will move their ornate mouths, arms, legs and head, Phillips doesn’t use her puppets in performances. Unlike the traditional puppet-makers of Eastern Europe, Phillips doesn’t use molds for any part of her creations. She creates each individually from bits of clay, scraps of cloth, fur, papier maché, wire, pieces of jewelry and whatever else inspires her. She takes pains with every detail, as she sculpts their hands, feet and faces, sews their miniature button-down oxfords or cloaks, and then attaches their strings. Phillips’ keen observation skills and sense of humor come through in her attention to every stylized accessory: A parrot hangs on its own string beside a cartoonish pirate puppet. She even has a coffee-swilling Kaladi puppet, complete with a fanny pack. “He has a fleece vest and the sweater over the shoulders,” Phillips says. With their gnarled claws and enlarged features, her recent works have a more fantastic appearance than her earlier whimsical caricatures. Two of her largest pieces stand almost three feet tall and look like trolls with bulbous clay noses and over-sized ears. Some look like they are straight out of The Dark Crystal, cartoonishly grotesque with nose rings and four-inch canines made of deer antlers. Phillips says she asked her friend’s son, who was only a foot taller than one of the large marionettes, to pose with it for a picture, but like Phillips when she was his age, the boy was too afraid.

— Rachel McLellan

Foundation names latest arts award recipients

RASMUSON: Poet John Haines receives the top honor for 2005.

By MARK BAECHTEL
Anchorage Daily News

Published: November 6, 2005

The Rasmuson Foundation has announced the recipients of its Individual Artist Awards for fall 2005. The awards, first presented last fall, are given in three tiers as part of the foundation's 10-year, $20 million Arts and Culture Initiative.

The first-tier honor, the Distinguished Artist Award, went to Fairbanks poet John Haines and includes a grant of $25,000, said Jeff Clarke, the foundation's chief administrative officer.

One of the foundation's review panelists called Haines' work "spare and darkly beautiful, steeped in the mystery of the frozen North."

The second-tier awards, Individual Artist Fellowships, are intended to enable midcareer or mature artists to focus their energy, attention and resources for one year while developing their creative work. The fellowships, which include a grant of $12,000, are being presented to:

• Anchorage sculptor Jack Ayap'run Abraham, for folk and traditional arts (Yup'ik)

• Fairbanks sculptor Kathleen Carlo, folk and traditional arts (Athabascan)

• Anchorage poet Olena Kalytiak Davis, literary arts

• Kotzebue writer (and Daily News columnist) Seth Kantner, literary arts (creative nonfiction)

• Palmer guitar maker Thomas Malapanis, folk and traditional arts

• Anchorage artist Susan Share, crafts (book arts)

The third tier, Individual Artist Project Grants, is open to emerging, midcareer and mature artists and consists of awards in varying amounts. These awards are for specific, short-term projects that have a clear benefit to the artists and the development of their work. These grants, given twice yearly, were awarded in this round to:

• Fairbanks composer John Luther Adams, music composition ($5,000), to support his recording of a new full-length orchestral work

• Fort Yukon ceramicist Sarah Beaty, crafts (clay) ($5,000), to enable her to build a fast-fire kiln

• Anchorage photographer Michael Conti, visual art ($4,400), to help him create photo illustrations for short stories by Jack London and Ernest Hemingway

• Juneau photographer Mark Daughhetee, visual art ($4,990), to allow him to purchase photo equipment and produce three solo exhibitions

• Juneau writer Ernestine Hayes, literary arts ($2,200), to pay her way to the annual Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, where she will preview her recent book

• Chugiak writer Judith Lindenfelser, literary arts ($3,000) to help purchase a computer she will use to complete a book

• Fairbanks photographer Charles Mason, visual art ($5,000), to to purchase a large-format ink-jet printer for his 2006 solo exhibition.

• Homer basket maker Mavis Muller, visual art/crafts ($4,000), to allow her to purchase a new computer and camera which she'll use to document her work.

• Anchorage mixed-media artist Alexandra Phillips, visual art ($5,000), which she'll use to purchase tools and supplies for her production of new work.

• Fairbanks blacksmith Jake Pogrebinsky, folk and traditional arts ($5,000), which he'll use to travel to Israel for advanced blacksmithing study.

• Juneau filmmaker Patrick Race, media arts ($5,000), to allow him to attend an intensive directing and screenwriting program in Seattle.

According to Rasmuson Foundation program associate Victoria Lord, to date the foundation's award program has provided more than $380,000 in project grants to 36 artists as well as 13 fellowship awards and two Distinguished Artist awards.

The next deadline for artists wishing to apply to the foundation's project grant program is March 1. For information, call Lord at 297-2827 or visit the foundation's Web site at www.rasmuson.org.

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Arts editor Mark Baechtel can be reached at 257-4323 or mbaechtel@adn.com.

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Constantly surprising

'Earth, Fire and Fibre' juror drawn by artists' imaginative choices

By DAWNELL SMITH
Anchorage Daily News

Published: January 16, 2005

Unusual materials and mysteries impressed David Revere McFadden, the juror of "Earth, Fire and Fibre XXV: The Alaska Statewide Biennial Juried Craft Exhibition." But the dearth of entries in some areas left him hungering for more.

The show opens today at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art and includes 81 works by 43 Alaska artists who use materials ranging from hide and stoneware to wax and polyester.

"There were just some unusual things, some artists whose names I had never heard before doing such innovative work," said McFadden, chief curator and vice president of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. McFadden has organized more than 150 exhibitions on decorative arts, design and craft and has published more than 100 books, articles, catalogues and reviews.

In choosing works for "Earth, Fire and Fibre," he looked at 377 slides of work and then culled the number of entries before seeing them in person.

The imaginative and delicate blending of images in Anna Ramsburgh's work in ceramics caught his eye. The three earthenware pieces look formal and graceful, yet incorporate industrial patterns and forms from floor grating, water pipes and drain spouts. He gave her pieces the Juror's Choice Award.

The work "turned industrial patterning into something elegant and traditional, even though its not," he said.

Ramsburgh is new to the museum's directory of artists. She moved to Alaska five winters ago, but didn't focus on ceramics until more recently. She will finish her graduate studies in art with a thesis show in April.

She feels drawn to classic Greek ceramics and the connection to the period's architecture, so she used the same principles when integrating the patterns and forms of pipes and surfaces.

Though she won McFadden's acclaim and $1,000, Ramsburgh might not have entered the show without a nudge from her professor. She had never seen the exhibit and had no idea what to expect, but the stature of the juror and venue convinced her to try.

The downside to a juried show like "Earth, Fire and Fibre," McFadden said, is that a lot of people just don't submit work, especially when the word "craft" appears in the title.

"That's the dirty 'c' word," he said. "That's why we changed our name." (The Museum of Arts and Design was formally the American Craft Museum.)

During his juror's lecture at the museum last month, he suggested eliminating traditional distinctions between art, craft and design by emphasizing beauty and meaning, not tiers of importance.

But misconceptions continue. Alex Phillips, winner of a $500 award, admits that she "thought the show was going to be mostly woven baskets."

Intricate and delicate basketry made the cut, of course, but so did Phillip's mixed media piece, "Hairy Circle." The work includes two hatchets imbedded in dresser drawers with wax and then hung side by side with small plastic bags of teeth, hair and simulated body fluids as connective tissue.

The mix of materials fascinated McFadden. "It's what I look for in these juried shows," he said. "I loved the beautiful softness of the wax combined with the other rather strong and jarring images."

But he also appreciated the elegance and beauty of Mary Hertert's polyester piece, "Leaves on Water," another $500 award winner. The tangible, yet fleeting garmentlike hanging looks like a kimono of shimmering sunshine and autumn leaves.

"It is luscious," McFadden said. "It is just really exciting because of the way it looked, and in art, first impressions matter."

Getting the attention of someone like McFadden confirms Hertert's own sense of progress.

"It's exciting to have someone knowledgeable pick what I consider my best work," she said. "You know your best work, and it's nice to have it validated."

Another $500 award-winner, Denise Heimel, looks forward to the exposure for yet another reason. She wants to make connections at today's reception and see what other artists are doing. Her desire for these associations stems from a life on the road, both as the child of an Air Force serviceman and as an adult who moved from place to place for work and change.

She lived in England for half a decade before moving to Wasilla a few years ago, and she lived at various places along the West Coast before that.

Heimel submitted several stoneware pieces that look like plastic stacking toys with a center cone and colored rings. Unlike those toys, her work appears earthy and raw. Her winning piece, "Remains to be Seen," has a ring with horsehair flaring out of it and others with stitching on the outer seams. In other work along the same lines, she sometimes fills the rings with sand, sticks, stones and shells to conjure up the brittleness of decaying things.

Given her druthers, she'd lay out a basket of rings and cones and let people go to town putting them together.

"I like the idea of interchangeable things," she said. "Rather than paint a static piece, I like the assembly part of it."

Heimel's merging of clay with other intriguing materials matched the theme of McFadden's other selections. In his juror's statement, McFadden delighted at the many surprises he discovered at the show but lamented the absence of entries in glass, metal, wood, furniture, functional tabletop items, enameling and mixed-medium fields, like jewelry.

An elegant furniture piece by Mark Wedekind provided some relief in these areas with its smooth and fastidiously joined beauty. "Little Sue" looks both refined and untamed with exquisitely crafted drawers and a stone foot.

The black walnut top, about waist high and a foot wide, provides a natural knot hole from which rises a smooth, curled piece of dark wood reminiscent of incipient antlers. The branch continues down the front of the three drawers -- cut so that they can open -- and ends as a leg with curled wood toes wrapped around a round rock.

Wedekind found the rock on the Little Susitna River. It contrasts with the table's other three legs, which are ordinary but deftly executed. Like most of the pieces McFadden highlighted with awards, "Little Sue" offers surprises at every edge, slat and corner. The rock provides a focal point from which to begin and end, a concrete object from which to develop the ideas and stories it evokes.

"I consider what I do as hand-shaped sculpted furniture," Wedekind said. "The more I do it, the more I incorporate curve and sculpting."

Hence the mystery, a feature McFadden admires no matter the medium. One of the award winners, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, embraces mystery in pieces like "Pore Scraps," a mixed-media piece with reindeer fur, pig intestine, sealskin, sheepskin and acrylic.

"I find her work haunting and poetic," McFadden said. "It's intimate and delicate and perplexing because it's mysterious."

As it happens, a show of Kelliher-Combs' work also opens today in the gallery next to "Earth, Fire and Fibre," conveying yet another layer of mysteries and materials, mingling and playing off each other.

Reporter Dawnell Smith can be reached at dsmith@adn.com

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EARTH, FIRE AND FIBRE XXV opens today at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art with a reception from 1 to 3 p.m. The exhibit of art from clay, glass, metal, wood, fiber, bone and stone will continue until March 13. A solo exhibit of work by Sonya Kelliher-Combs also opens today.

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Award winners

JUROR'S CHOICE AWARD ($1,000)

Anna Ramsburgh, Fairbanks, for her body of work in ceramics

$500 aWARDS

Denise Heimel, Wasilla, "Remains to be Seen," earthenware

Mary Hertert, Anchorage, "Leaves on Water," fiber

Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Anchorage, "Pore Scraps," fiber/mixed media

Alex Phillips, Anchorage, "Hairy Circle," found object/mixed media

Fran Reed, Anchorage, "Breach II," fish skin and gut

Mark Wedekind, Anchorage, "Little Sue," wood

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Florence Clement, Wasilla, body of work in woven basketry

Anne Luetkemeyer, Anchorage, "Gear Up for Fungus," wood and bronze

Monica Jenicek Lyall, Anchorage, "The Restrictive Covenants of Southport," fiber

Rasmuson award: Windfall winners

Rasmuson award recipients -- and some of the rejected -- say persistence counts

By
DAWNELL SMITH
•
Anchorage Daily News

Published: March 13, 2005
Last Modified: March 13, 2005 at 07:37 AM

Everyone knows how it feels to get picked last or not at all, but artists endure rejection every day -- from their internal critics and everyone else's. It comes with the territory, but it buckles the spirit just the same.

Last fall, 218 artists submitted applications for the first batch of individual artist awards from the Rasmuson Foundation. Eighteen of them got good news, "so there were 200 people disappointed," said Victoria Lord, a program associate for the foundation.

"It's always tough getting rejected," said David Woodie of Juneau, who keeps a file labeled "bitter rejections" in a drawer. "Everyone who's a serious artist feels there's a core importance to their work but might not see it in other people's work."

Woodie, who first studied art at 13, gave up painting to work as a logger and commercial fisherman. He took up the brush again in 1989 and started looking for exhibition space in the mid-'90s. He found hardly anyone to hang his work, but his doggedness paid off when he got one of seven $12,000 Rasmuson fellowships last year.

"Really, to a degree, there's an element of the lottery involved," he said. "I can think of seven other deserving artists who weren't on that list in a second."

On the other hand, until the awards were announced, Woodie had never even heard of Inupiaq sculptor Sylvester Ayek, who won the Distinguished Artist Award of $25,000.

Other artists must look beyond Alaska to make their work. Anchorage filmmaker Mary Katzke said the cost of a one-hour documentary is $500,000.

"I'm using (the Rasmuson money) as leverage for further grants," she said. "It's a very good thing to have your resume to demonstrate that you have $12,000. ... I think the most important part of this is to show this commitment from home."

Some grant givers get 1,000 applicants and fund only 10 to 12 of them, Katzke said. She feels successful if one in 10 of her proposals gets approved.

"I don't think rejection ever gets easier," she explained. "I can't tell you how many times I've said 'OK, this is it, this is too hard. I quit.' "

After the Rasmuson grant, she secured a $10,000 commitment from the Mental Health Trust Authority for her primary project, a documentary about mental illness and child abuse. She now has almost half the required budget.

"I guess I'd say it's not like I waltzed in and took the prize," Katzke said. "It's been a very long road, 25 years, and an occasional boost, emotionally and financially, is truly valued."

FEEDBACK FOR SUCCESS

When the Rasmuson Foundation's rejection letters went out last year, Lord wrote notes on every one of them. She based her suggestions and observations on comments made by the selection panel, which consisted of members of the art community in Seattle.

Helen Howarth, the foundation's program officer for arts and culture, believes the process exposed artists to people outside the state while also removing any appearance of bias.

Probably the biggest misstep made during the first round of awards had to do with the kind of grants solicited, Howarth said. More than 100 artists applied for the $12,000 fellowships and only 86 for project grants, the real flesh and blood of the program.

The current application instructions define the terms concretely. The fellowships are for artists with at least five years of steady progression in their work. Those with art careers that go beyond 15 years qualify for the Distinguished Artist Award, and artists at all levels can apply for project awards.

The first time around, Alex Phillips applied for a fellowship and was rejected. She should have asked for a project grant for foundry equipment or to pay the fees to get her slides and work to galleries in the Lower 48.

Still in her 20s and one statistics class short of her bachelor's degree, Phillips sees each step as a part of a greater journey -- the sale of a puppet to the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, a solo show at The Battery Gallery of Contemporary Art, a juror's award in "Earth, Fire and Fibre." Her recent show at The Battery included hybrid figures in metal and ceramics with feathers, quills, wax and more.

"It's just a slow thing," she said, still unsure if she could pull off a proposal before the next Rasmuson deadline on Tuesday. "You just have to build up to something."

Susan Moore, who lives in Wasilla with her husband and daughter, also was turned down. Now she sees the wisdom of asking for a grant to help buy a bigger kiln for glasswork. She painted and studied at the New York Studio School a long time ago but found her calling in glass about eight years ago.

"If you can't stand rejection, you can't get into art," she observed. "You get it or not, but you just have to keep going."

That willingness to try again will pay off for many artists, Howarth said. "To those people who ask why it's the usual suspects that got it (the awards), it's because they apply for everything."

The awards eventually will benefit many artists, she said, and artists can help their cause by asking people within and outside the art community to read their applications.

"Instead of creating the application in isolation, get input from others," Howarth said.

FROM PUPPETS TO PHOTOS

The project awards, with grants of up to $5,000 handed out twice a year, support artists in all phases of their careers. Successful applicants presented specific objectives with detailed budgets for everything from equipment acquisition and wages to workshop tuition and travel.

Buzz Schwall and Brian Hutton used grant money to pay the crew of their puppet production of Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni," which showed at the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts last week.

Andrew Daoust got grant money to help upgrade the insulation in a kiln he's building. The upgrade will reduce the amount of particulate matter produced when he is fusing glass.

Fairbanks painter Susan Farnham earmarked her award money for a trip to a restricted area of Nepal with traditional Tibetan culture. She hopes to do small paintings on-site and larger ones when she returns home. So far, she is stuck in Katmandu with permitting problems, but she hopes to make it to the area by the end of the month.

Andromeda Romano-Lax of Anchorage, author of 10 nonfiction books including "Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez," will use her grant money to attend a workshop in Denver with an editor she admires. Now well into her first novel, she also hopes to use the money as a financial buffer during the rigorous rewriting process ahead of her.

Getting the money "gave me some real steam," Romano-Lax said. "You've got to take advantage of the emotional boost."

With a collection of rejections of her own, she offers this advice: "Keep trying, don't take it personally and really use it (the money) when you do get it."

Hal Gage, a photographer in Anchorage, doesn't talk with some of his friends about the fellowship award he won. It's a touchy subject, he said.

"Hey, it's just found money for me," he continued. "I don't feel any better than any other artist who submitted."

When applying, he sent high-quality slides and wrote a clear objective and artist statement with a list of accomplishments. He tried not to be humble, he said, but "I seriously did not even have a scintilla of hope in getting this grant."

Now he can focus on getting his "Ice" series to venues in and out of state. He also wants to use the grant as seed money for publishing a book. A book can lend credibility to a photographer, and credibility leads to more exhibits and books. In other words, the grant might provide the needed nudge to move Gage into a broader community of artists.

Carla Potter has accomplished exactly that through a yearlong residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Montana, courtesy of the Rasmuson program. Winning the $12,000 fellowship allows her to focus on her work rather than getting a job to cover the cost of her Anchorage apartment while away.

Potter misses her Anchorage family tremendously. One of her sons is in college, and the other is finishing high school.

"I haven't lived on my own for any length of time for over 22 years," she said. "It's physically painful, despite all of the wonderful distractions of being here at the Archie Bray."

Painful but stimulating. She will submit new work to the Bray and the "Masters of Mud" event at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, and will create a body of work for a show at the state museum in Juneau in 2006. And it may not be the sea-life-inspired forms she has done in the past.

"My previous work celebrates life but also represents personal attitudes in a metaphoric sense," she wrote via e-mail. "I think the new work will continue with these life themes but in a more direct way.

"I think I have just reached a point in my development where I understand more fully who I am and what I want to do as an artist. My technical ability is at a point that it is more apt for expressing the ideas in my head."

Reporter Dawnell Smith can be reached at dsmith@adn.com.

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RASMUSON FOUNDATION PROJECT GRANTS: Deadline for the next round of applications is Tuesday. For more information, go to

www.rasmuson.org

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Contemporary artists hurt by restrictions on new Battery Gallery

By MARK BAECHTEL
Anchorage Daily News

Published: March 13, 2005

We've given the Battery Gallery in the Ship Creek Center a lot of ink in recent months. Reporter Dawnell Smith and I have mentioned it in several articles and visited it most First Fridays to see how things are coming along. It might seem to be a lot of attention for the Daily News to be paying one little gallery, founded in a former hallway on the way to the former Post Office Mall's public bathrooms, and a brand-spanking-new gallery at that, run by a brash young guy on a shoestring. It would have been irresponsible of us to act otherwise. The reason this is so takes a bit of explaining -- hence this week's column.

My explanation begins with the closure last December of the Decker/Morris Center for Contemporary Visual Art of Alaska, an event that sent shock waves through the Anchorage arts community. The reason for this consternation might not have been obvious to the casual observer. To most living here -- whose experience with the city's art scene is the occasional First Friday event or the opening of an exhibit at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art -- it might have seemed no big deal. What's one gallery more or less? After all, there are dozens of other places in Anchorage and environs where the walls are covered with art, where shelves are stocked with gleaming ceramics and art glass, where the handicrafts flowing in from the villages and the workshops of Native artists are in abundant evidence. Surely these other places could take up the slack, right?

Wrong.

The fact of the matter is, the Contemporary, with its unapologetically high standards, its eclectic mix of media, its mixture of work by Alaska Natives and native Alaskans, and its openness to the work of emerging artists, was sui generic -- something that was clear even to a newcomer like me. It's not my purpose to go any further than that here; the Contemporary is a Caesar that has already been praised and buried. But what it is important to say is that the gallery's passing cast a long shadow over the prospects of exposure for anyone pushing the envelope (i.e., making risky, potentially unsalable, contemporary work) in Anchorage.

The Contemporary's closure brought about a serious crisis in the city's gallery wall space, but with the opening of the Battery by Marcello Muñoz and his wife, Edie, there was speculation the crisis might, at least in part, be averted. The roster of the artists who brought work in for the Muñozes' consideration -- artists like K.N. Goodrich, Linda Infante-Lyons, Don Ricker, Duke Russell, Wanda Seamster and others -- provided reason to believe this hope might not be in vain.

Now word comes that the Battery's lease on its space -- always based on a handshake anyway -- has changed, and without going too deeply into the details, the change dictates that the Battery can only be open on First Friday. The change was so abrupt, in fact, that it caught Alex Phillips -- a mixed-media artist whose highly challenging work was to be up all during March -- by surprise. She learned only at her opening that last Friday and Saturday were the only time she was going to get. And to add insult to injury, on Friday one of her more confrontational pieces was vandalized by someone passing through the gallery on the way to the bathroom. The Muñozes are searching for another space, though they're unlikely to find one on as agreeable a set of terms as those that made the opening of The Battery possible in the first place.

So the crisis continues, with no end in sight. Doubtless, established artists like those whose careers were begun or significantly advanced by Decker/Morris will continue to find a public -- though maybe not in Anchorage. But what about artists, like Phillips, poised to break out into greater currency, becoming the next new thing, enlivening the civic discussion that art can be?

There are now very, very few venues in Anchorage where those making contemporary art have even a ghost of a chance of having their work displayed. Jannah Atkins at Alaska Pacific University continues to open Grant Hall and Carr-Gottstein Hall to new work on a monthly basis, and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art remains, but its right, left and middle spaces are already booked through February of next year. The museum? Unless you're a well-established artist, other than making it over the transom via a juried competition like "Earth, Fire and Fibre" (in which Phillips won a special juror's award), forget it.

And though there is a smattering of other local galleries that will handle some contemporary work in addition to their bread-and-butter offerings, the chances of getting represented there are also pretty remote.

Some artists are trying to take their fate into their own hands: On the First Friday just past, a group of artists including Noel Bell, Gina Edwards, Tami Jo Phelps, Aaron Schlosberg, Sandy Stevens and Thais Thomas mounted their own show in the lobby of the Land Title/Trendwest building on C Street. By all accounts, the event was packed. Others are getting the word out via Web sites, e-mail lists or mini-shows in coffee shops, nightclubs and sandwich joints. But at the risk of sounding elitist, no matter how high the quality, it can be hard to take really seriously work that you can view while munching on a sub.

There's no good answer to this problem, but there's the hope that someone will step forward to do The Right Thing. Maybe it will be Muñoz; maybe someone else. Clearly there's a need. And based on the crowds that have packed The Battery, there's a market.

Art Beat is a weekly potpourri of news, gossip and the arts editor's observations and opinions. Submit items for consideration to Mark Baechtel, Anchorage Daily News, P.O. Box 149001, Anchorage 99514-9001, e-mail mbaechtel@adn.com or call 257-4323.

Emerging artists struggle to find gallery space. Some just give up

Breaking & entering

By DAWNELL SMITH
Anchorage Daily News

Published: April 10, 2005

Money. That's the problem. Not enough of it and having to scrape some together all the time.

Struggling, starving artists know about rubbing two nickels together, especially those who do contemporary work rather than commercial stuff. Worst, the ideas and processes that felt so inspiring in college fade as the dull realization of need sets in -- the need for space, for supplies, for time. For money.

Alex Phillips, 27, makes contemporary art, mostly sculptures in the form of puppets, pull toys, wall hangings and hybrid figures made of pewter and found objects like ceramic doll torsos, tools and dresser drawers. Her work has all the elements of Frankenstein. It's playful and unsettling, born from dissimilar parts -- animal, human and otherwise.

It's really cool stuff, visceral yet polished, but you can't see much of it anywhere. Her recent show, "Bits and Pieces," suffered a painfully limited run last month at The Battery Gallery of Contemporary Art when the gallery's owners slashed hours to Friday evenings only. Phillips filled in on Saturdays too, but foot traffic was sparse. Art buyers just don't flock to that mall on Fourth Avenue.

She took the hit in stride, with some attitude. "I never really thought of myself as an artist. I've just made stuff, and it usually works out. If it doesn't, I don't care."

Of course she does -- everyone does -- but her success in juried shows in Alaska and Outside gives her heart. She sold several pieces at The Battery, won a juror's award in this year's "Earth, Fire and Fibre" competition and sold a piece to the Anchorage Museum of History and Art a few years back.

Still, the financial burden looms. Now alienated from the studio space, equipment and sense of community that college offers, she works from her small, cluttered apartment and earns a living by gardening in summer. She wants to go back to school for her master's degree and was even accepted at the University of Colorado in Boulder, but she worries about digging herself into a larger hole financially.

On the other hand, "what else am I going to do?" she said. "A master's opens the door to teaching opportunities."

Yes, teaching, the inevitable pull toward steady income and benefits. Scott MacDonald wanted only to paint during his life, but he understands the impulse to teach. He has a full year to go in a graduate teaching program at Alaska Pacific University.

"I felt like I would need a day job anyway to support myself," he said, "so I may as well do something that I find legitimate and valuable."

MacDonald got his bachelor of fine arts degree in Minneapolis and made a living as a painter there but has been in Anchorage off and on since 1996. He likes his hometown and wants to stay. During his 20s, he didn't worry so much about his next paycheck or meal, but at 33 he sees the value of financial security.

"It's hard to make it as an artist anywhere," he said. "I think emerging artists get to a point where they're either going to make it or they're not."

Despite his career change, he still sees himself first and foremost as an artist. He will have a show at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in August and has work spaces in his basement, kitchen and living room.

"I know I have talent. I know I have a vision in my work that's unique, and I'm driven to do it internally," he said. "That just doesn't go away."

But he also knows that only a few venues dedicate themselves to contemporary art, and only a small, loyal following keeps those galleries afloat. By teaching, MacDonald hopes to earn a living, explore a new endeavor and do art without compromising his artistic values for money.

CLOSINGS AND OPENINGS

With the closing of the Center for Contemporary Visual Art of Alaska (formerly the Decker/Morris Gallery) in December, outlets for contemporary work diminished considerably, even with The Battery right on its heels. MacDonald hopes the museum will pick up its level of support for contemporary art. He already notices more local contemporary artists represented in its galleries.

"I think they're embracing it because there's growing quality of contemporary local art, and they're buying pieces that have nothing to do with Alaska," he said. "I think the museum has to take a stand and help develop contemporary art in Anchorage, just like the small galleries do."

With First Friday venues now ranging from bars and coffeehouses to private homes and hotel lobbies, artists can also look beyond galleries to get exposure. Photographer Michael Conti recently hung some of his fine-art photos at Kaladi Brothers Coffee, in the same mall as REI and Title Wave Books. He likes the venue because he can "get his work out to the people."

Conti, 33, had a solo exhibit at the International in September and now needs time to create work for places like the International and the museum, so these alternative venues -- if chosen wisely -- offer needed exposure as he navigates life with a 9-month-old baby, commercial work and the rigorous business of balancing the need for sleep and income with that of family and artistic expression.

Taking a somewhat different tack, Phillips wants to expand her range rather than try to fit her work into the varied venues in the city. Though Anchorage has plenty of galleries, most don't deal in the raw sculptural work she creates, so she hopes to get into places like Bunnell Street Gallery in Homer and into juried shows out of state, submitting her work to the risks of shipping and receiving.

LIVING THEIR ART

Others young artists have chosen to examine traditional ideas about where art belongs.

"For a long time, I felt like I didn't exist if I wasn't working on a project, a specific thing," said Amy Tomson, 30. But now "I feel my intention is not so much to be seen, to have shows."

Instead, she sees art as moving through her entire life, expanding into all areas of thinking and feeling, and she wants to take time to observe and be still. She got involved in several shows after getting her undergraduate degree from the University of Kansas. Last year, she did a semester of graduate work in Vermont but left when she realized it wasn't nourishing her.

"What I want is to be engaged in the world," Tomson said. "It doesn't have to be in a particular form."

Her engagement in the world includes a job in cultural anthropology that takes her to villages in outlying areas of the state. She also wants to create time for herself, the kind uncluttered by deadlines and expected results and, as it happens, the kind rarely supported in our culture.

This approach to art has developed gradually. One of Tomson's last public exhibits in Anchorage took place in 2002 at The Covered Bridge Gallery over Ship Creek, a temporary venue. Her collaborative installation with Kim Brown presented a mass of urban debris, cataloged in varying ways, as an artistic testament to the waste and leavings of human development on the landscape.

The same might be said about the development of art and artists as a whole, that the process can take its toll on the artistic landscape.

"I just think of all the things people are capable of and so much of it is to make things faster or to make more money out of it," Tomson said. "How about taking that energy and doing something else?"

She has this idea, for example, of turning an old building in Government Hill into something of a research center/community hub with everything from historical information about beluga whales and the Dena'ina people to kilns and a compost center.

People might not call it art, she said, but she would. The shared enterprise and understanding of a particular place would matter.

None of Tomson's ideas preclude her from exhibiting work in a traditional setting. She still sews, creates and builds and may someday end up with something to show. She has merely freed herself of the notion of art as production and, in turn, tried to align her artistic intentions with her human ones.

EXPERIENCE, NOT MONEY

Heather Shumar, 32, has a similar approach. Though struggling to make ends meet as an artist, she doesn't get frustrated.

"That's not my goal," she said. "I don't separate my art from the rest of my life. Art is a way of seeing and experiencing and appreciating life."

Through her lithographs and drawings, she explores painful personal and cultural themes, nourishes her views about social issues and exposes secrets.

"I feel like I'm kind of an artist in hiding," Shumar continued. "I'm still doing my work, and it's important to me, but because working toward a show isn't my goal, it allows me to delve a little deeper."

Her challenge as an emerging artist has more to do with her internal world than anything else, she said. For a long time, she asked herself, "Who am I to spend all this time and all these resources on making art?"

Then Shumar read something about art that described it not as self-indulgence but rather as necessary for the growth of human cultures. That nudged her through one dilemma, but she still grapples with the fear of success. With success comes responsibility and all the challenges that go with it.

But Shumar, like most artists, struggles with issues of time and studio space. Since making prints relies on technique and processes, having access to equipment and support can mean the difference between giving up and learning something new, she said. That's one reason she works as an assistant in the print making studio at UAA. The job pays a bit and allows her to use the studio.

One of her pieces, "He up and left ...," depicts a smiling mother with two young children, joyful and full of possibility. A Buddha figure lies on its back above the family, high in the frame, and an empty skull hovers to the lower right of the mother. Up the center rises a lotus in two tones of pink, light and dark, its roots in the earth and its flower toward the heavens.

The Buddha gives up earthly life to know suffering, Shumar said, but it's the mother who understands it. It's by living that we suffer.

For some artists, "breaking and entering" means picking locks through who they know and busting down doors through outright self-promotion; for others it means watching and waiting for a slightly open door; for still others it means breaking out of traditional expectations altogether and entering unknown ones.

Whatever the way, the sense of suffering never wanes; it merely poses the same question: "How much can I sacrifice?"

"Not everything," Conti said, "because I have a child now."

Reporter Dawnell Smith can be reached at dsmith@adn.com.

Mountain View exhibit stokes renaissance fires

By MARK BAECHTEL
Anchorage Daily News

Published: August 21, 2005

You've been hearing the scuttlebutt for years -- some of it reported in hopeful articles on these pages: Mountain View's renaissance is on its way, and the artists are leading the charge. "Mountain View in Motion" has received the blessing of (insert name of politician or politicians running for office, developer, philanthropic organization, wannabe social engineer here) and will be under way next week, next year, next decade, next year in Jerusalem. You could be forgiven if you muttered "Yeah, right" under your breath, then turned the page.

Last weekend, however, in a triumph of action over rhetoric, the Loose Affiliation of Local Artists and Marcello Muñoz's Battery Gallery of Contemporary Art joined forces at the Mobile Trailer Supply building -- one of two properties the Anchorage Community Land Trust has been angling for -- to steal a page from Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland's playbook: "Never mind the critics and politicos! We've got a barn; let's get the kids together and put on a show ourselves!"

The result, dubbed the Salon des Mobile Trailer Supply Invitational Group Art Show, was quite a show indeed. Muñoz, Bruce "if-it's-arts-he's-there" Farnsworth, Sheila Wyne, Buzz Schwall, Duke Russell, Michelle Miller and a host of others converged on a truck bay in the Mobile Trailer Supply complex to create a gallery space. The two-day show's purpose was to anchor the notion of a multidisciplinary art center at the site firmly in Anchorage's civic mind, and to raise money to send artist Donald Ricker and his painting "Redemptoris Custos" to Italy in December for the Florence Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art. Muñoz, Farnsworth and company used borrowed lighting and begged labor to create a space that, if a bit rough-and-ready, still managed to be more dynamic than any other on offer in Anchorage.

And then there was the art. Sales can be one measure of an exhibition's success: According to Muñoz, of the four-score or so pieces on display -- including prints, etchings, paintings in nearly all media, mixed-media works, sculptures and photography -- there were 18 sales. Maybe not quite up to the booze-fueled mark chalked at the old Visual Arts Center during the go-go petro days, but respectable, especially considering that many of the artists who sold work were virtual unknowns. About one in five of the artists invited to display their work were either first-timers to exhibition or were relative newcomers.

Many of these works bore the marks of their makers' youth -- self-consciously in-your-face compositions with political undertones, more or less experimental works better left in the studio (and which, one assumes, would have been left there if their makers had had careers long enough to allow them to build up a larger body of work), a reliance on attitude over execution. However, other works provided pleasant surprises -- surprise being the emotion that, for me, has always preceded the urge to buy.

For instance: a large, untitled canvas by Erin Pollock -- a composition of dancing female nudes -- was compelling in its color, energy, use of materials and approach to the question of surface. The painting gave some hint of the trajectory Pollock might take into future works, once her mastery of face and expression is equal to her understanding of form, allowing her to transcend a tendency toward sentimentality.

Nearby hung two of Scott McDonald's sculptural multimedia pieces, "Soldier" and "Angel." Both managed to rise above the poor lighting they received (hung as they were in one of several "light holes" created by the ad-hoc illumination), creating an understated but eloquent effect with humble, seemingly untreated surfaces and careful joinery that rewarded a bit of patient attention. Those finding McDonald's pieces affecting might want to look at more of his work at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art, where he is exhibiting through month's end.

Alex Phillips had five of her disturbing baby forms hung on a single supporting beam; by the end of the first evening, all five had sold as a group.

In executing his kinetic paintings, Ted Kincaid seemingly combined the sensibilities of graffiti and alternative comic art, guided by a desire to confront. The result was half successful ("Kopf-Object" and "Ein Bildung"), half unsuccessful ("The Show" and "Tooth Decay"), the successes coming largely from the energy and wit of composition, and the latter two undone by somewhat sophomoric thematic material.

A generous complement of familiar names was salted among those whose reputations on the Anchorage scene are not yet established. Katherine Coons, Hal Gage, Mary Hertert, Judith Hoersting, Gary Kaulitz, Duke Russell, Wanda Seamster, Ruth Sorensen and Sheila Wyne all had work on display, as did the aforementioned Ricker. Some of it, as one might expect from such a veteran group, was exceptional.

Kaulitz had a very pleasing group of prints and a single canvas on offer in the gallery's middle country. The prints were the most interesting. These were richly executed, dark (in both palette and emotion) without being murky, and surprisingly affordable. Kaulitz also gave purchasers the option of buying the pieces framed or unframed.

Seamster's "Tangent for a Deviant Thought" does what Seamster seems to do best: bring quotidian imagery (an eye examination, a pair of mating ants) together in a way that jolts expectations and intriguingly gestures toward a veiled intention.

For me, the show's centerpiece was Wyne's "Memorial," a large piece that I guessed immediately, seeing it across the room, was hers. It combines large-scale photo transfer work, glass panels, paint and 3-D elements in a melancholy grid composition. Though at $5,000 it was one of the most expensive pieces on offer, I was surprised to see it hadn't sold by the show's second day.

A few reservations: It might have been nice if the works' media were listed along with prices and their creators' names. I don't think I'm unusual in wanting as much information as possible about the art I'm considering buying.

Also, though the works on display offered a wide range of sensibilities, Gretchen Sagan was the only contemporary Native artist in the group. Maybe this omission stems from the experience of the show's organizers (we tend to go with what we know), but -- at the risk of seeming to apply justifiably hateable PC standards to a matter of personal taste -- this exclusion seemingly picks up where the late Visual Art Center left off, with contemporary Native artists, who had formerly provided much of the venue's energy and spirit of innovation, pushed out. A word to the wise may be sufficient.

According to Farnsworth, who has acted as liaison between Anchorage's arts community and the Rasmuson Foundation, which has provided a $5 million commitment to the Mountain View Arts District project, the future of the Mobile Trailer Supply building as the site for the multidisciplinary arts center is not entirely secure.

"A lot of different ideas have come out," he says. "But there is unanimity of opinion about the notion that there is going to be a multidisciplinary art space. The question now is where and when."

Farnsworth said the Anchorage Community Land Trust is planning to close on Aug. 31 _{with the property's current owners, the Carey family. Keep an eye on this space: I'll be sure to let you know what the next movement is in the "Mountain View in Motion" saga.}

Art Beat is a weekly potpourri of news, gossip and the arts editor's observations and opinions. Submit items for consideration to Mark Baechtel, Anchorage Daily News, P.O. Box 149001, Anchorage 99514-9001, e-mail mbaechtel@adn.com, or call 257-4323.