Chatter Marks

Historian Ian Hartman is an Associate Professor and Department Chair at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He teaches history from the bottom up, meaning he looks for how regular, working class people have been agents of change throughout history. This is the opposite of how so much of history has been recorded, which has looked at it through the perspective of The Great Man Theory. The Great Man...

Musician Zane Penny says that every creative endeavor he’s been involved in has led him to where he is right now. It goes back to 5th grade, when his mom heard about an audition for a short film. Zane was interested, but he’d never acted before, so he was nervous. So nervous, and full of doubt, that he almost skipped the audition all together. But then, at the last minute, he decided to go. Everyt...

Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich grew up in Galena, Alaska, a place that continues to have an impact on her art. You can see it in her beadwork and the masks and sculptures she creates. They represent — among other things — birds, berries, caribou, seals and fish. In fact, when she thinks back on her childhood in Galena, fish are a big part of her memories. She remembers watching them being caught i...

Brothers Garrett and Jake Swenson are part of the hip hop group Brother Buffalo. They’re of Eyak heritage, with roots in Cordova, Alaska, but they grew up in Anchorage. As far as their understanding of their heritage goes, they didn’t have much to go on because so much of the culture was taken from their people and documentation of it was either destroyed or spread across a number of museums. So,...

Glen Klinkhart is a former homicide detective, and in 1981 his older sister was sexually assaulted and murdered at their home in Anchorage, Alaska. She had thrown a party at her house and after everyone left, a nineteen year old classmate returned. To cover up his crime, he burned down their house. He was later caught and sentenced to 75 years in prison. Glen says that we can intellectualize why p...

Ed Washington says that a lot of his music comes from a cathartic place — not necessarily from a need to be heard, but a need to express. He’s been that way since he was a child. In fact, there’s this video his dad took of him when he was a baby and he’s singing to himself. It was an early moment of something he would continue to do throughout his life, sing himself happy. Last year, Ed spent a lo...

As a kid, Martin Sensmeier would daydream about being an actor. His older brother helped influence that dream. He had the first laserdisc player and the first flat screen TV in Yakutat, Alaska. So, Martin would go to his house to watch movies with him. He remembers it being such a special event. It was also special to see movies in the theater, but there wasn’t one in Yakutat. So, the only time he...

Lily Hope is a traditional Chilkat Weaver from Juneau, Alaska. Both of her parents worked as full-time artists, so she grew up around the hustle of entrepreneurship and the responsibility of carrying on tradition. Her mom, Clarissa Rizal, learned how to weave from the late Master Chilkat Weaver, Jennie Thlunaut. Lily says that her mom probably felt the urgency of her own mortality, that it was imp...

Nick Carpenter, of the band Medium Build, grew up in a religious household, so the church and its teachings ruled everything. Money was important too, but he says it was always just out of their reach. So, in many ways, that resulted in them idolizing it because so many emotions were attached to it. Obsession, fear, paranoia, shame. It influenced their perception of themselves and others. This led...

Nyla Innuksuk is an Indigenous director from Canada and she recently released Slash/Back, a horror / sci-fi movie about a group of Inuit girls who save their remote arctic community from an alien invasion. She says that the horror genre has always been a big part of her life. Her mom — being a fan as well — introduced it to her, actually. One day when Nyla and a friend were having a sleep over, he...

Mossy Kilcher is a homesteader, a musician and an ornithologist. When she was young, she was afraid of nature. It was just so big and there were so many ways to die. But the more time she spent outdoors, the better she understood it. Making music and recording bird songs helped. She realized that it wasn’t about taming the wilderness or dominating nature — like her father believed — it was about l...

In the mid-90s and early 2000s, Josh Medsker documented the Alaska punk scene. He started out as a fan, attending as many shows as he could, and then he began documenting the scene. For about three years, he wrote for the University of Alaska Anchorage student paper, “The Northern Light,” the city’s alt-weekly, “The Anchorage Press,” and for his own publication, “Noise, Noise, Noise.” Articles, in...

Crystal Worl is fresh off of two big projects. A mural in downtown Anchorage and a commission for Google. The mural depicts and applies traditional Alaska Native traditions and symbols — the formline art of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian, for example. It’s 120-feet long, the largest thing she’s ever designed. The Google skin, titled “Primary Ravens,” depicts ravens, which represent the Creator a...

Priscilla Hensley is a writer and a documentarian. Before she started working on documentaries, her job history was varied — she had worked in communications and, having made a few short films herself, had some prior knowledge of filmmaking. There was also a period of time when she considered herself a poet. All these jobs have helped her to become a jack-of-all-trades. Her time in communications...

Melissa Chimera creates mixed media paintings and installations that are research-based investigations into species extinction, globalization and human migration. Her portraits are fictional, but they’re based in empirical fact. She combs through the public record of peoples’ lives, collecting information to better understand them beyond what DNA can tell us. She includes elements and details of w...

Before he got to the level he’s at now, Tlingit artist James Johnson taught himself the fundamentals of the Tlingit artform — he taught himself how to draw, how to carve, how to sharpen his knives. He taught himself the fundamentals of formline. His dad taught him the importance of traditional knowledge — that when you create a piece, you create it for your clan. Be it a paddle, a bowl, a bentwood...

Dog musher Aliy Zirkle has always felt a strong connection to animals, dogs in particular. She tells this story about how when she was a kid and lived in Puerto Rico, there were a couple of stray dogs that pulled her around on a skateboard. Mushing was in her blood, even then. For 30 years, mushing has been everything to Aliy. It’s been her passion and her career. And understanding her dog’s abili...

Rob Kinneen has been an ambassador for Alaskan cuisine through his guest chef appearances, speaking engagements, cooking demonstrations and private caterings. His work has revolutionized how people see and understand the state’s traditional foods. His understanding of traditional foods goes back to growing up in Petersburg, Alaska, where he remembers clamming with his uncles, fishing with his dad...

Kim Rich is a journalist and an author. She wrote the classic memoir “Johnny’s Girl,” it’s about her tumultuous upbringing in Anchorage’s underworld. Back in the 1960s, her dad, Johnny, worked Anchorage’s nightlife — gambling houses, prostitution and get-rich-quick schemes. Her mom, Ginger, was an exotic dancer. She had mental health issues and spent years of her life in a number of institutions....

Jimmy Riordan is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who’s currently in-residence at the Anchorage Museum, digitizing and archiving the work of Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta musicians, as well as all the other Alaska music he’s collected over the years. He spends a lot of time in thrift stores and going through junk bins and scouring the internet — anywhere old records might exist. When he first start...

Nyabony Gat says that her immigrant story started 22 years ago. In 1992, when her parents and older siblings fled from South Sudan and found refuge in Ethiopia — the Second Sudanese civil war was going on between the central Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army. It was a long and bloody war and it caused four million people to be displaced.  Nyabony doesn’t remember much from...

When interdisciplinary artist LaMont Hamilton was young, he drew portraits of figures that he admired — Jimmy Hendrix, Che Guevara, Malcom X. He called it “scribble art,” a term he invented to describe abstract art that, the longer you look at it, the more it reveals. Then, as he got older, he became interested in photography. But he says that his first love, the one that he considers to be the fo...

Charles J. Tice is a visual and literary creative in Anchorage, Alaska with an emphasis on photography and gonzo journalism. He's currently in-residence, at the Anchorage Museum, working on a project called Artist Proof #6. It’s a book that’ll feature 100 photographs of strangers, assisted by a narrative. The writing is important, he says, probably the most important part of the project. So, he wo...

Photographer Young Kim says that it’s weird to live in a place that’s so big and so busy that people aren’t checking up on each other. He prefers smaller communities where everyone knows each other. His longing to be part of something tight-knit might come from his early childhood, when he and his family lived in Sand Point, a town of about 600 located along the Aleutian Islands.  Young’s sense of...

Rico Worl owns a business in Juneau that aims to distribute money spent on Alaska Native art back into Alaska Native communities. His business is called Trickster for the raven in Alaska Native culture that represents the Creator and is always playing tricks. Trickster began as a skateboard company, so there’s that association too. In fact, the idea for it started when Rico painted his clan crest...