Join us for a virtual talk at 12pm Mountain Time, with Dr. Ellen Carrlee, conservator at the Alaska State Museum, and Sonya Kelliher-Combs, mixed-media visual artist. Carrlee and Kelliher-Combs will discuss a trilogy of interrelated exhibitions held at the Alaska State Museum in 2023, all related to the material, historical, and cultural aspects of sea-mammal gut in Indigenous Alaska.
ASL Interpretation is provided for this event.
Sonya Kelliher-Combs is a mixed-media visual artist of mixed descent: Iñupiaq from the Alaska North Slope community of Utqiaġvik and Athabascan from the Interior village of Nulato as well as German and Irish ancestry. Kelliher-Combs works to create opportunities to feature Indigenous voices and contemporary artwork that inform and encourage social action through visual art, community engagement, curation, and advocacy. She is one of the few Alaska Native artists practicing today whose work incorporates gut. Sonya Kelliher-Combs is a United States Artist Fellow, a Native Arts and Cultures Fellow, an Eiteljorg Fellow, a Joan Mitchell Fellow, and Rasmuson Fellow. She holds Fine Art degrees from Arizona State University and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Kelliher-Combs lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska.
Dr. Ellen Carrlee has been working with Alaskan museum collections for more than 20 years and as the conservator at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau since 2006. Her research emphasizes networks of relationships among persons both human and non-human, and her practice promotes hands-on engagement with materials alongside indigenous artists and intellectuals. Her doctoral dissertation about Yup’ik relationships of marine mammal intestine explores the reasons for both decline and resilience of gut as a culturally significant material beyond mere utilitarian explanations. Ellen Carrlee holds degrees in anthropology, art conservation, and art history from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, New York University, and the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Credit line: Detail of “Legacy: Transcend” by Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabascan), comprised of gut parkas from the Alaska State Museum collection. Part of the 2023 exhibit, “Visceral: Verity, Legacy, Identity. Alaska Native Gut Knowledge and Perseverance.” Photograph by Brian Wallace.
