For years, Bill Sabo had been telling his children they needed to get to Anchorage and empty out his old storage locker.
“We knew there was some art, and he was saying we ‘really didn’t want to lose this one,’” his daughter Agnes Barton-Sabo said.
After the retired art professor died in April 2024, Barton-Sabo knew she had to act. Making her way to the U-Haul storage park on the Old Seward Highway armed with some bolt-cutters, she finally cracked the door open.
What she found was a trove of work from one of the most prolific, humorous, medium-hopping Anchorage artists of the last 50 years — packed so full it went right to the rafters.
“Imagine the combination of an artist and a hoarder and imagine every single thing he kept because it could be an art piece some day,” said Barton-Sabo, who is a professional artist based in Oregon.
That storage locker has been pared down and curated into a retrospective show this month. “My Hands Are Connected to My Heart” is on view at Georgia Blue Gallery until Saturday, April 26.
Sabo was instantly recognizable by his loud Hawaiian shirts, outrageous sense of humor, deep, rolling voice and a beard so white and bushy it would frequently incite children to tell him what they wanted for Christmas. He was part of a wave of artists that came of age in the 1970s and 1980s that broadened the popular understanding of what “Alaska art” could be.
“Alaskan art at the time — if you didn’t have Mount McKinley or a moose or a cache in it, it wasn’t done,” said Alaska musician and performer Mr. Whitekeys, who met Sabo in the early 1970s when they were both new to the state.
At the time, Whitekeys was playing five nights a week with the Oosik Music Company, Chilkoot Charlie’s house band. One night, Sabo wandered in carrying a copy of Mark Twain’s notoriously risque book “1601” and took a seat near the stage.
I said, “Hey, there’s a guy over there reading a dirty book,” Whitekeys said, getting a laugh out of the crowd. It was the beginning of a decades-long friendship.
“Sabo did everything — he was a potter and he did drawings and paintings and collages and sculpture and he did it all really well but he also was totally crazy,” said Mr. Whitekeys, reached by phone while in the woods near Gunsight Mountain on Friday.
“He had this point of view that was just nuts, and it was a treat to be around him because you never knew what was going to happen.”
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Born in Perth Amboy, N.J., in 1946, Sabo first came to Alaska while enlisted in the Air Force in the 1960s. When his service was complete, he spent some time hitchhiking across the country and abroad in Europe, then got his Bachelor of Fine Arts in ceramics and sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.
By ’74, he was back in Alaska and teaching at Anchorage Community College (later absorbed by the University of Alaska Anchorage). He found himself part of an emerging movement, centered around faculty and students at the college.
“These guys just sort of broke out of the mold and starting doing other art that was very cool. And it was groundbreaking in Alaska at the time,” Whitekeys said. Keith Appel, Alex Combs, Pat Austin, Joan Kimura, Sam Kimura and Wassily Sommer were all part of that scene, Whitekeys remembered.
In 1973, Whitekeys and Sabo collaborated on an art exhibit that was filled with models of torsos in different mediums, from ceramic to concrete to wood to Jell-O. It became known as “the body show” but the official title was “A Fur Rendezvous Art Exhibit Without A Single Picture of Mt. McKinley.”
Sabo’s humor and knack for a pun worked their way into several of the musical numbers that became part of the Whale Fat Follies. (Working through a fish-focused period, Sabo’s contribution of “Our flounder, which art in heaven / Halibut be thy name” was in the repertoire for years, Whitekeys said.)
Anchorage artist Duke Russell recalled seeing Sabo at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage in the mid-’80s. Sabo had set up a big whiteboard and told Russell to stand in front of it for a Polaroid portrait. Weeks later Russell received a card in the mail that he still has to this day — his “artistic license.”
On the front was Russell’s photo and some (somewhat) identifying information. The back reads: “Licensee is entitled to make artistic works and statements and have creative thoughts without feeling confined by logic, public opinion, good taste, normalcy, religious dogma, artistic dogma, or anything else.”
Sabo would often use humor and absurdity to poke fun at politicians, corporations and the status quo. He once ran for lieutenant governor of Alaska because he knew that all the candidates would be interviewed on television, Barton-Sabo said.
“He brought props with him to the interview and hoped it felt like an ‘SNL’ sketch, waving cheerleading pom poms for arts and education,” Barton-Sabo wrote.
“He and his rubber chicken received several thousand votes.”
(In fact, Sabo won 5,771 votes, or 9.4% of the vote, in 1994, coming in third out of six candidates.)
In the 1980s, Sabo took a sabbatical in San Francisco and completed his master’s degree at John F. Kennedy University. His artistic studies delved into psychology, philosophy, dreams, metaphysical studies and symbolism.
“I think that galvanized the ‘why’ behind the art he was making,” Barton-Sabo said. His pieces were often humorous, but also rich with symbolism and searching for greater meanings. Recurring symbols included ravens, the Penrose triangle, the eye. Themes included religion, mysticism, animal mythologies — a vein of inspiration Sabo loosely described as “myths, dreams, meditations, and Spenard.”
“He always said that (ceramic artist) Alex Combs told him you have to make art every day,” Barton-Sabo said. She remembers sneaking out of bed when she was a child to find her father working on art projects late into the night. “It would always seem very mysterious, how dedicated he was with it. He was making all the time.”
For Sabo, humor and the serious work of creating art were not exclusive to each other. In line with the Dada artists and surrealist art traditions, he continually worked to interrupt normalcy and “insert goofiness,” Barton-Sabo said.
“It was just another way of making a connection with people, breaking the ice, keeping things light enough that you can actually access a deeper conversation or more challenging topic.”
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Sabo retired after 28 years of teaching in Alaska and left the state in the early 2000s. He spent his later years roaming the country in a Chevy panel van, Barton-Sabo said. He visited his three children in California and Oregon, went back to the Michigan lodge he’d worked at as a teenager, and struck up with a community of ceramic artists in Florida.
He was “just was driving all over and looking for weird stuff. Looking for UFOs on Route 66 and driving the Natchez Trace, looking for hitchhiking ghosts. He didn’t want to stay put,” Barton-Sabo said. She said it was how he felt called to live.
“In every sense, small and large, he was always a seeker. He was looking for mysterious answers, he was looking for adventures.”
“My Hands Are Connected to My Heart” will be on view 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday until April 26, at Georgia Blue Gallery in Anchorage (3555 Arctic Blvd.; 907-563-2787).
Reporting for this project was supported by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.