Alaska Native mask makers are featured for a group First Friday exhibit for the month of March at the Alaska Native Arts Foundation in downtown Anchorage. The show, titled "Paths of the Past," represents masks as physical manifestations of stories that preserve and perpetuate Alaska Native cultures.
Perry Eaton (Alutiiq), Eve Mendenhall (Iñupiat), Benjamin Schleifman (Tlingit) and Ron Senungetuk (Iñupiat) are a few of the artists who will have their work at the gallery. Expressive masks were used in dances and ceremonies. Some masks in this exhibit are realistic, others abstract. They are made of wood, animal skins, metal, bones and feathers.
Perry Eaton said, "Traditional masks were used to communicate ceremoniously, ritually and for entertainment." Eaton's contribution to this exhibit includes one humorous expressive mask and one serious.
"Our masks were a part of our personal identity," Schleifman said about the traditional use of Tlingit masks. "They can symbolize temperaments such as happiness, discontent, anger, sadness and joy. During ceremony or dance, our masks were part of an arsenal for visual storytelling of an oral tradition."
Schleifman went on to say about his mask in this exhibit, "'Age of Abundance' is the title of my mask, a fully functional dance mask. Its primary form is that of an old man, secondary is the frog. In all societies, with age comes abundance. In knowledge, friendships, experience that forms our personality and hopefully monetary wealth. The frog, to the Tlingit, is the keeper of wealth. Any time you see an elongated tongue in Northwest Coast art, it is symbolic of wisdom being passed from generation to generation, the true wealth of our people, a living and breathing and evolving culture."
"In the region where I'm from, the masks I saw were constructed of bone and ivory, decorated with furs," said Eve Mendenhall, an Iñupiat multidisciplinary artist from Kotzebue. "Every mask was a different shape with organic materials that were shaped by nature. Our masks usually had two sides to them, meaning the face would be different from the left or right, or the back and front. This duality in depictions was a part of us, people, who were trying to talk and speak to the other side. The other side was an audience, the spirits, animals, or another person.
Of her piece in the exhibit, Mendenhall said: "My mask is carved out of wood, decorated with feathers. The mask is very large, with the adornments angled to come towards the viewer. The main face of the mask is decorated in two colors to highlight the sharp differences between the empirical world and the spiritual realm. The right side is different from the left side."
Visit the Alaska Native Arts Foundation in March to view the collective mask exhibit.
Trina Landlord is the Executive Director of the Alaska Native Arts Foundation. She can be reached at trina@alaskanativearts.org.