The 2025 Triennial will be on view until Sunday, Sept. 7, on the fourth floor of the Anchorage Museum. (Photo by Jim Kohl / Anchorage Museum)

There’s still time to catch the 2025 Alaska Triennial, a rare opportunity to see the breadth of artistic innovation happening across the state.

“It’s really like Alaska through its artists’ eyes,” said juror Mary Bradshaw, director of Visual Arts at the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse, Yukon.

The last day to see that exhibit will be Sunday, Sept. 7. Then it will be three years before the Anchorage Museum hosts a collection of its kind again.

Bradshaw selected 47 artists from a pool of about 222 applicants through a blind jury process for the exhibit. (Disclosure: A family member of the author of this article was a featured artist in the Triennial.) What makes the Triennial stand out is that it only includes recent work — created since 2022 — and is open to all mediums.

“What hit me immediately was just the sheer amount of different mediums that folks were working in — textiles, paper, woodwork, video, quill work,” Bradshaw said. “It was really incredible to see the mastery people had over so many different forms.”

Through it all, there is a connecting thread, Bradshaw said.

“Within Yukon art, the landscape is kind of always present in some way, even if it isn’t directly depicted,” Bradshaw said. “That feeling is definitely here too — how much this land shapes us.”

“Play Place,” by Joshua Demain, 2024. Oil paint on copper panel. (Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum)

It’s not always the landscape you’d expect. One of the standout pieces, “Play Place” by Joshua Demain, is a small, jewel-like oil painting depicting sunset over a South Anchorage intersection. An intense, joyous burst of color lights up a sagging McDonald’s sign and retail storefronts.

“To convey the message that beauty is everywhere, much of my work focuses on everyday encounters of the sublime that are frequently incongruent with our preconceived notions of picturesque beauty,” Demain wrote in an artist statement. “Frequently incongruent with preconceived notions of picturesque beauty” may be the most gentle description of an Anchorage commercial corridor on record.

“House Between Trees,” by Grace Choi, 2023. Acrylic on linen. (Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum)

Demain’s sunset hangs next to Grace Choi’s large painting “House Between Trees,” set in a residential neighborhood near downtown Anchorage. On a bright winter day, two people and a dog stand together in front of a yellow house as blue shadows stretch across the berms. It’s a scene that feels as cozy as a snow day off from school.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the sparks that shine within the more mundane moments of life that often go unnoticed,” Choi wrote. It’s “that familiar feeling of home where you’d take a look at my painting and think ‘Oh! I’ve been there before!’ and call over your friends or family to recall specific memories of that place and time.”

“What Good is Fruit that is not Sweet?,” by Young Kim, 2022. Hand-bound book. (Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum)

In “What Good is Fruit that is not Sweet?,” Young Kim’s handmade, stab-bound book is designed to resemble the Korean sillok, or the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty, of Korean history. It contains photographs documenting life with his aging mother as she confronts changes to her health and mobility, exploring the “relationship as parent and child and how roles shift as time persists.”

Scenes like these could be set in any number of communities across the world, but they are still “as much of an Alaska scene as, say, Denali,” Bradshaw said.

When Alaska’s famed natural landscape is the focal point, the artists of the Triennial exhibit often reveal it in unexpected ways.

“Tanana Braids,” by Gail Davidson, 2023. Textile. (Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum)

Gail Davidson’s “Tanana Braids” uses rug hooking and braiding to create an aerial topography of the Tanana River. Melanie Lombard gathered the leaves of devil’s club — a plant synonymous with summer days — and treated them in a cyanotype process, exposing them for 48 hours under “sunlight, moonlight, and even under the aurora borealis,” Lombard wrote. What resulted are frosty blue and white exposures resembling the crystalline structures of snow flakes.

In “Dream Space II: Subsistence & Reminiscence,” Ethan Lauesen depicts a figure berry-picking, an innocuous-seeming activity infused with an atmosphere of palpable discomfort.

“Dream Space II: Subsistence & Reminiscence,” by Ethan Lauesen, 2023. Etching, aquatint, and chine-collé. (Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum)

“The prints I develop archive my experiences as a visibly Queer Alaskan Native and how I am perceived in Alaskan public spaces,” Lauesen wrote in an artist statement. “The work I create directly references the emotions associated with the tension surrounding doubt and lack of acceptance.”

Events of recent years show their influence in many of the pieces. A quilt by Arlitia Jones incorporates unconventional materials including “drops of blood and puppy chew marks,” reflecting the artist’s experience during COVID-19 with a new puppy. In Lauren Stanford’s “Aftermath,” the scars carved by wildfire mark the form of a roaring bear. A budding fiddlehead fern emerges from the figure, a reminder that “among the ashes, in the aftermath of loss, there is always hope,” Stanford wrote.

“Aftermath,” by Lauren Stanford, 2022. Ceramic. (Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum)

Bradshaw received short artist statements along with the works as part of the blind jury process, but wasn’t informed of the identity of the artists, which led to some surprises.

“Type #5,” by Javid Kamali, 2024. Plastic medication bottles and acrylic paint on canvas. (Photo courtesy Anchorage Museum)

“Type #5” by Javid Kamali, uses prescription pill bottles melted down and formed into balls, which were then mounted to a cobalt blue canvas. The abstract piece is a commentary on the issue of medical waste, which gained additional resonance for Bradshaw when she later learned the artist is also a doctor.

Collectively, the show is an intriguing record of 2022-24. “What I hope is that this show is a glimpse of the last three years of art making. We can’t show everything, but this is a taste of it,” Bradshaw said.

The 2025 Alaska Triennial will be on view until Sunday, Sept. 7 on the fourth floor of the Anchorage Museum. Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Sunday, with extended hours until 9 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 5. Painting at the End of the Ice Age, featuring landscapes by Cordova-based artist David Rosenthal, closes the following week on Sept. 14, 2025. (anchoragemuseum.org; 625 C St.)

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Reporting for this project was supported by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.