Image: Bunnell Street Gallery, Homer
The Ursa Major Fund has published mid-project reports from its 2026 awardees, offering a view of artist-led projects underway across Alaska—from workshops rooted in local materials and Indigenous cultural revitalization to public ceremonies, collective performance and environmental storytelling. The update arrives as applications open for the fund’s 2027 cycle.
Administered by Bunnell Arts as a regional regranting program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Ursa Major supports risk-taking, public-facing work by Alaska artists and artist groups. Its current reports make that public dimension tangible. In Kotzebue, papermaker and visual artist Desiree Hagen and multimedia artist and wildlife biologist Christina Nelson are hosting free workshops that use local plants for papermaking, dyes and pigments. Their plans include a community fiber-harvest day with a local Iñupiaq artist, a grass-weaving and basketry workshop, and craft sessions with a youth group.
In Northwest Alaska, Sarahlily Stein is incorporating caribou antler and fish leather into land-based arts workshops connected to the Selawik Science and Culture Camp. The sessions are designed for rural communities served by the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge and incorporate local environmental knowledge. In Kodiak, printmaker and multimedia artist Beverly Cole has been offering free, hands-on workshops, including fish-print tea towels and a pre-carved stamp of the Kodiak Senior Center’s band, The Whipper Snappers. A Community Access Fund helps remove financial barriers to participation in her other workshops.
Several projects use art to carry cultural memory into shared public settings. Jennifer Younger’s ‘Intertwined: Returning To Our Roots’ included an exhibition on Yakutat Tlingit spruce-root weaving and photographs, along with talks, hands-on workshops and an artist market developed with Tlingit master weaver Jennie Wheeler and her students. The project is intended to foster intergenerational learning and mentorship.
Amber Webb is preparing a caribou-tooth belt and carving a mask for a ceremony at Kanakanak Beach in September. The event will tell the story of Anna Yukluk, who was killed at Kanakanak Orphanage in 1929; Webb plans to dance the mask and belt and send the mask into the unseen. In Anchorage, the gender-expansive, multiracial and disabled collective Where Worlds Meet has been experimenting with sound systems, masks made from cardboard and paper clay, embroidered tapestries, painted masks on canvas and written pieces for public events.
Nadia Jackinsky Sethi’s ‘A Love Letter to Our Glaciers’ treats the landscape itself as a site for art. The project includes masks representing glaciers, among them Portage Glacier. “Part of the thinking behind this project is thinking about reframing land as a gallery,” Sethi says. Some works will later be combined with an additional exhibition project at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, scheduled to open late next spring.
The fund is set to distribute $60,000 among ten Alaska artist or arts-collective projects in 2027. Applications are open from September 1 through October 15. Among the current projects still taking shape is Rachael Juzeler’s construction of a glass furnace at her studio on Douglas Island, intended to support her kiln-worked glass practice and provide a space for collaborative artwork creation.
