City museum acquires work from Tenakee Springs, Juneau artists

The Juneau-Douglas City Museum has been awarded money from the Museums Alaska Art Acquisition Fund, supported by the Rasmuson Foundation, to purchase two artworks from Juneau artists: “Approaching” by Kathleen Wiest and “Portrait of Alexandra Bookless” by David Woodie.

The Museum has twenty-two creative works in its permanent collection that include images of local beaches and shores. All twenty-two use a bird’s eye view or are part of a more dynamic landscape with water, mountains, and sky. Wiest’s painting “Approaching”, acrylic on canvas, offers a perspective of water meeting land.

Kathleen Wiest, a former art instructor at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School, is a multi-media artist who works as a painter, potter, and printmaker. Wiest attended the California College of the Arts and University of Oregon to study sculpture and drawing and received a degree in Art Education. Influenced by nature and relationships, Wiest’s creative goal is to “express the essence of a place, an object, or a being”. Her paintings are created after observation, sketches, photos, and plein-air work. Wiest works in Tenakee Springs, where she lives off-grid at her cabin studio, three miles by trail or boat from town.

David Woodie’s work is held in The University of Alaska Museum of the North, Alaska State Museum, Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Alaska Art Bank, and numerous private collections. In 2004, he was awarded a Rasmuson Foundation mid-career artist’s fellowship.

The Museum owns two additional paintings by David Woodie, also purchased with Rasmuson Art Acquisition grant funds, that reflect his signature style of narrative painting set in a landscape that juxtaposes the artist’s fascination with the ugly and the beautiful in dream-style narrative compositions. The Museum’s latest acquisition, “Portrait of Alexandra Bookless,” oil on canvas mounted on panel, demonstrates the artist’s accomplishments in portrait painting. The Juneau-Douglas City Museum has 47 non-photographic portraits by Juneau artists in our collection. Adding Portrait of Alexandra Bookless to our collection complements this visual record of our community.

For more information about the City Museum visit http://www.juneau.org/library/museum/ or call 907-586-3572. Admission is free during the month of December thanks to a donation from Robert and Michele Storer.