Exhibitions and Curatorial Projects
Credit Anchorage Museum
Credit Anchorage Museum
Pass the Mic
Anchorage Museum
On view Oct. 7, 2022 — Sept. 3, 2023
Pass the Mic celebrates contemporary Alaska sound art and music. In Pass the Mic, visitors are immersed in the power of sound through a sonic exploration of the genres, modes and styles that make up the soundtrack of Alaska. Spanning nearly the entire third floor of the museum, this interactive sound experience offers visitors the chance to listen to, create, or interact with sound. Pass the Mic features music from Alaska music makers and sound artists and was developed in collaboration with Alaska’s home-grown Grammy-award-winning rock band Portugal. The Man. An in-gallery music main stage hosts live and recorded performances, along with public programming offered throughout Pass the Mic’s yearlong run.
Stuart Hyatt: Stations
Anchorage Museum
On view Oct. 22, 2021 — Sept. 4, 2022
Presented as part of the Anchorage Museum exhibition Counter Cartographies: Living the Land, Indianapolis-based artist Stuart Hyatt's Stations project invites questioning of Western modalities of mapping, which are often visual. With Stations, Hyatt encourages listening as a way of knowing and making sense of our world.
Stations combines the scientific method with the creative process, engaging visitors with a new type of subterranean map. The centerpiece sculpture incorporates a fully-equipped, 2000-pound environmental monitoring station on loan from the IRIS Consortium. The back of the station connects dozens of audio cables to a small recording studio where cartographic animations dance in real time to sonic energy. The station’s front solar cell panel connects to a large boring tube where a short film beams onto the gallery wall. Colorful imagery and text - drawn from the project’s companion book - flow along the other walls, creating a poetic, multisensory map of the ground beneath us.
Counter Cartographies: Living the Land
Anchorage Museum
On view Oct. 8, 2021 — Sept. 4, 2022
Counter Cartographies: Living the Land presents contemporary artworks that examine our relationship to land, proposing alternative ways of thinking about and experiencing the landscape around us. Artists draw attention to the way culture, identity, emotion, ancestry, displacement, power and colonization shape and inform our understanding of land.
Counter Cartographies expands conventional understandings of cartography (mapping), moving beyond two-dimensional Western-style maps. The artists in this exhibition present forms of mapping that are impermanent or experiential through artworks featuring elements of storytelling, dance and sound. Many of the works challenge existing power structures and invite us to consider how language, memory, and culture shape the way we relate to the land around us. They articulate global challenges, from climate change to geopolitical conflict, and encourage us to imagine more resilient futures.
This yearlong exhibition is presented through diverse voices and formats, and includes in-museum and outdoor installations, film, artist residencies, and public programming.
Social activism inspires the artists included in the exhibition, many of whom work in sculpture, large-scale installation and performance. Among them are multidisciplinary artist Christina Seely, who addresses complexities of both built and natural global systems, and Grammy-nominated artist and musician Stuart Hyatt, whose projects transform field audio recordings into musical works.
Credit: Anchorage Museum
Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes
On view April 2 - Oct. 3, 2021
Anchorage Museum
The Arctic has its own distinct rhythms. The sounds of natural forces, animals, and humans come together to create their own kind of music — soundscapes that murmur and boom, throb and hum, crack and cry, rustle and sing. Listening closely to the sounds and silences of the North opens up an intimate and resonant understanding of place.
A soundscape is the collection of sounds heard in a specific place. With artists and museum collection objects as sonic guides, this exhibition inspired by Northern soundscapes is presented on site at the Anchorage Museum and in an abridged form within this online space. It features music, sound art, and field recordings from the region. The sound art takes inspiration from the environments of the Circumpolar North and features work from artists and musicians of Alaska and other parts of the US, as well as Russia, Canada, and Scandinavia.
Included in this exhibition is the work of 10 sound artists and musicians from around the Circumpolar North who received a one-minute sound clip from one of five sites throughout the state, including Anchorage, Nenana, Nuiqsut, Soldotna, and Sitka, where the Anchorage Museum continuously records sound data as a part of a soundscape ecology research project.
Each soundscape recording tells a short, sonic story of a place on a specific day, time, and season. The excerpts were recorded daily at 9 a.m. January through May 2019. Each artist took a distinct approach to responding to the sound clip provided. Some incorporated an excerpt; others drew inspiration from specific sounds and rhythms for their new compositions. These sound pieces are derived from sound data gathered from across Alaska.
The central experience of Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes in the museum space is delivered through sound “cubes” broadcasting these soundscapes along with the new works of sound art created by artists in response to them. Online visitors may experience the soundscapes and artists' works by clicking on the images below, which contain audio files.
The exhibition highlights Anchorage Museum collection objects along with recordings of their sounds and presents sound art throughout the museum building and grounds from a number of artists. Participating artists live in or are connected to Alaska and other parts of the US, Russia, Canada, and Scandinavia, and range from hip-hop beat makers to throat singers to composers. They include: Marja Ahti, Leah Beeferman, Aqqalu Berthelsen, Davyd Betchkal, Matthew Burtner, Foresteppe, Nicholas Galanin, Shawn Greenlee, Merritt Johnson, John Luther Adams, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Pamyua, Silla and Rise, Alex Somers, and Jana Winderen. These artists' recordings will also be available in a limited-edition release by the museum’s Unbound Records.