Five Southeast Alaskans received individual artist awards from the Rasmuson Foundation this year — Juneau photographer Ben Huff, Juneau photographer Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, Juneau poet Christy NaMee Eriksen, Hydaburg cedar bark weaver Jacinthe Two Bulls and Tenakee Springs puppeteer Darius Mannino.
Huff received an $18,000 fellowship; the other four artists received $7,500 project grants. We spoke with them to learn about the work they’ll be doing.
Photographer Ben Huff: Ice Fog Press
With his fellowship, Huff will start Ice Fog Press, a Juneau publisher that will make art and photography books “about Alaska, by Alaskans.” He plans to publish his first book this fall — a small edition of a series of photos of satellite dishes at night, “Transmission.”
Huff came up with the name “Ice Fog Press” while living in Fairbanks, working on “The Last Road North,” his first book.
“In short, books are the single most important thing to me — as a photographer and appreciator of art and photography,” Huff wrote in an email. “We’re experiencing a ‘golden age’ of sorts in independent art book publishing internationally, and I believe there’s room for Alaska to have a seat at the table…. Taking the long view, I will grow the effort into a collaboration with other photographers and artists. I believe that the book is the ultimate vehicle for photography, and I want to help facilitate more good Alaska stories and ideas.”
The press is also, he said, an opportunity “to step outside of my own work and take some creative risks.”
He’ll soon be moving his studio space into the Triangle Building downtown. It’ll also house Ice Fog Press and be “a place for other artists to share ideas, view my personal collection of books, and make things happen,” he wrote.
While he said it’s too early to name people he’d like to work with, “there are a few photographers who I’ve been wanting to work with for years, who have substantial bodies of work that I’d love to help get into the world, and we’ve had discussions that always start with ‘someday…’ This is that someday,” he wrote, later adding “I’ve been dreaming of this press for ten years, and now that we’re finally moving forward, eventually, I intend for it to be legitimate and respected voice in the conversation about Alaskan art.”
Christy NaMee Eriksen: Spoken word videos
Project award recipient Christy NaMee Eriksen, a cofounder of Woosh Kinaadeiyí and owner of Kindred Post, will work with Juneau filmmaker Ryan Cortes to create three spoken word videos, each two to five minutes long and featuring a performance of a new or revised poem.
“The videos will be used to help represent/promote me to new audiences where I’ll be bringing (or hope to be bringing) my work, as well as be a companion resource to my spoken word album that a previous Rasmuson award helped me produce,” she wrote in an email. (That album, “How to tell if a Korean Woman Loves You,” was released in April 2014.) “Many teachers and cultural workers have asked for online videos of my work that they can use in the classroom, so this project is also in response to feedback from those who’ve expressed interested in using my poetry as an educational tool.”
The videos will show a range “of style, tone, or topic,” she wrote. “I currently write mostly about motherhood, culture, Asian America, Korean adoption, womanhood, and community. Many poems have overlapping themes, so I’m hoping to cover as much of a cross section of my work as I can with three videos.”
She’s excited, she said, both about working with Cortes and “exploring the opportunities that film gives us in terms of taking spoken word to a new level. Each time I collaborate with a new artist/new medium I feel like the work goes in new, exciting places.”
An example video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J12QelZ3CaM.
Jacinthe Two Bulls, cedar bark wrap dress, purse, large-brimmed sun hat
Jacinthe Two Bulls of Hydaburg began thinking about the outfit she’ll make with her artist award a decade ago, after traveling to Ecuador as a Fulbright scholar, she said.
“While meeting with indigenous leaders in the Andes, one person asked me why I wasn’t dressed in my traditional dress. That was when I began questioning what type of clothing I could make with my knowledge of Haida cedar bark weaving,” she wrote. “Since then I have created a skirt and a shirt from cedar bark. So far, time and space have been the largest limiting factors on the creation of the dress I’ve been dreaming of.”
She also plans to line the dress with handpainted silk; in the last year, she’s been painting Haida designs.
She hopes to have the dress done by December and the project done by May 2017, though she said there it’ll likely undergo a lot of trial and error. She wove the skirt flat on a table from a pattern, and the shirt on a dress form. For this project, she may move back and forth between forms and flat surfaces.
“The adding and subtracting of warps to create shape will also take careful consideration, as well as deciding which material and type of weave will allow for the most comfort and wearability,” she wrote. “I will work out the weave and design as I work. I have a design drawn out now, but I don’t doubt it will be entirely different than this vision by the end.”
She hopes both to show the garment when it’s complete, and for a person to be able to wear it comfortably, she said.
Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, “Dirty Old Town”
Patrice Aphrodite Helmar, who was born in Juneau and lives in Juneau and New York, will complete “Dirty Old Town,” which the Rasmuson Foundation describes as “photographs of a familiar circle of hometown haunts in Juneau.”
The name, Helmar said, comes from a song of the same name sung by the Pogues and other bands. It’s a song “I’ve always lovingly associated with Juneau,” she wrote in an email.
“I started this work last summer by shooting 300 sheets of 4×5 film,” she wrote. “I drank too much coffee, drove around in a beater car, and revisited places that were charged…. Being from, and growing up in a small town is about a constant state of remembering. These photographs aren’t conceptually or documentary based. I like to work in the vein of something that one of the great American photographers, Gary Winogrand, said about photography, ‘I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is.’”
To complete the project, she’ll buy a Graflex Speed Graphic Camera, built in the US in the 1940s and used by newspaper and police photographers, she said. A professor at Columbia recommended she use it when she was in graduate school.
“It’s a tank of a camera and holds up to my bringing it into different, and not so delicate environs. It uses sheet film that’s four by five inches, and even the most expensive digital cameras on the market today can’t replicate the quality,” she wrote.
Helmar said she’d love to have a show of “Dirty Old Town” at one of the state museums. If she doesn’t get accepted for one here — she notes that her work is a very different style from many Alaska-specific shows — she’ll put one together in New York, where she lives part of the year and teaches at the Pratt Institute and Columbia University as a visiting professor.
Helmar also plans to use “Dirty Old Town” as her first book.
Darius Mannino, Puppetry “Menu”
Darius Mannino, a puppeteer and owner of Party Time Bakery in Tenakee Springs, plans to interweave traditional forms of puppetry with relatively new aspects of culture. He’ll develop a body of solo puppetry called “Menu.” He plans seven short works that he’ll perform on demand at a toy theatre stage. That stage will be both stationary — at his bakery — and mobile, attached to the back of a bike.
“What’s going to be created by this project is a exquisite wooden object that will function as a toy theatre stage,” he said. “It will create a platform for me to build an initial body of work — to create this menu of small, solo-performed works of puppetry, toy theatre, object theatre. Those are lots of different words for this. A shadow play. The point is, the box can be anything.”
The menu idea is to have a menu of small works that can be performed on demand at the bakery or when it’s traveling,” he said. A person might look at the menu and “order” works four, six and three, for example.
“It’s not necessarily trying to bend to the contemporary notion of on demand, but it fits nicely with what I already do, which is run a bakery,” he said. “It slides right into this idea of how we receive media.”
Just like a food menu, there will be options for kids and for adults, he said.
Mannino hopes to take the show to other Southeast Alaska communities, and because other Tenakee artists will be involved in the production of different elements of the project, he’ll also, in a way, be taking Tenakee from town to town.
“The idea is, it not only reflects my own creativity, but is a reflection of the community… visually or aesthetically,” he said. The bike also reflects an aspect of Tenakee, as it’s carless. People get around by foot, on four-wheelers or on bikes.
The bike idea also comes from kamishibai, Japanese street theatre and storytelling popular in the 1930s and ’40s. Storytellers, who traveled by bike from community to community, made their living selling candy.
“One of the great things about puppetry in America is that there is no canon, and one of the worst things about puppetry in America is that there is no canon… like many things in this country, it’s an amalgamation of a lot of different ideas and thoughts,” he said.
Mannino hopes to have “Menu” on the bakery’s wall in May 2017, and to begin traveling after that.
Other Rasmuson award recipients
Outside Southeast Alaska, other fellows are Phillip Blanchett of Anchorage, Libby Roderick of Anchorage, Linda Infante Lyons of Anchorage, Melissa Mitchell of Anchorage, Keren Lowell of Anchorage, Nathan Shafer of Anchorage, Karrie Pavish Anderson of Galena, Rebecca Lyon of Anchorage, and Stephen Qacung Blanchett, based in Anchorage.
Other project award winners are Tom Chung of Anchorage, Emily Anderson of Fairbanks, Chloe Keller of Anchorage, Joshua Corbett of Anchorage, Byron Fierro of Anchorage, Jacqueline Madsen of Kodiak, Anna Hoover of Naknek, Steven Stone, Sr. from Hooper Bay, Jenni May Toro of Anchorage, Joe Yelverton of Anchorage, Rebecca Menzia of Fairbanks, Seth Kantner, based in Kotzebue, Gretchen Sagan of Anchorage, Chad David Benjamin Taylor, based in Anchorage, Karl Pasch of Anchorage, Joan Navivuk Kane of Anchorage, Eric Mouffe of Anchorage, Sarah E. Mitchell of Fairbanks, Ruby Suzanna Jones of Anchorage, Keeper Theodore Nott of Anchorage, and Desiree Hagen of Fritz Creek.
Don Decker, an Anchorage-based artist, received the $40,000 2016 Distinguished Artist award.
The invitation-only Individual Artist Awards Celebration Event is May 19 at the Sydney Laurence Theatre in the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts. Since the program started 13 years ago, the Rasmuson Foundation has awarded Alaska artist 409 grants adding up to more than $3.5 million.
• Contact Capital City Weekly editor Mary Catharine Martin at maryc.martin@capweek.com.
Go Ask That Old Cowboy, by Juneau photographer Patrice Helmar, for Buddy Tabor. This photograph is part of her “Dirty Old Town” series, for which she received a Rasmuson Individual Artist Project Award.
