Corey McKrill uses the new bike station’s stand, tools and pump to work on his bike. (Photo by Scott Burton/KTOO)
About a dozen people gathered this morning at the corner of West Ninth Street and Glacier Avenue for a balloon popping at a new bicycle repair station.
Instead of a ribbon cutting, project organizers Marc Wheeler and Jeong Kim used the new bike station’s pump to pop a balloon. (Photo by Scott Burton/KTOO)
The free, 24-hour station includes a bike rack, a bike stand, a pump and an array of tools. Corey McKrill, who is a founder of the bike advocacy group Juneau Rides, put his bike on the stand to try it out. He lives in the flats and thinks it will be a useful to him as a commuter and for neighborhood kids.
“Here’s a tire lever so if I needed to replace the tube in my tire I could use this to get the tire off and get into the bike tube. And here’s the pump I can use to inflate the tube after I replace it,” said McKrill.
The fix-it station was organized by neighborhood businesses and residents including Marc Wheeler of Coppa, Jeong Kim of Seong’s, Todd Mace of Pixel & Plume Design Co., Lacey Godkin of Capital Brew and John McConnochie of Cycle Alaska.
The public stations are trending; there’s one at Cycle Alaska, two are being installed at the University of Alaska Southeast and one is planned for the new Mendenhall Valley Public Library.
Tsimshian artist and teacher David A. Boxley just wrapped a pair of intensive, weeklong workshops on formline design and Tsimshian language in Juneau. He’s been at Lemon Creek Correctional Center teaching formline by day, and at the Walter Soboleff Building teaching Tsimshian language by night.
Entering the maximum security prison—with its checkpoints, razor wire barricades, metal detectors and armed guards—it’s hard to imagine an art class. Until you get to the library.
“I have nine hard-working fellas sitting around a big conference table with elbows flying, and pencils and erasers moving quickly, and they’ve got templates, and booklets with all the information and diagrams to help them produce the eagles, ravens, wolves and killer whales that they’re working hard to produce,” says Boxley who is best known in Juneau for the two-story high clan house front he made for the Walter Soboleff Building.
Nine men attended David A. Boxley’s four-day formline design class. (photo by Scott Burton/KTOO)
William Littlefield holds his drawing. He hopes to make and teach art professionally when he is released. (Photo by Scott Burton/KTOO)
The men wear bright yellow prison onesies and are of diverse cultural backgrounds. They look focused and work silently. Colorful examples of formline art are taped to the shelves of books, and natural light filters in through two skylights. Boxley circles the room observing the students’ work. Among them is aspiring Tlingit artist William Littlefield from Sitka.
“There’s been a few people that has been willing to teach me this but they don’t break everything down like how David has,” says Littlefield, who wants to make art and teach professionally when he gets out.
Boxley and class sponsor Sealaska Heritage Institute want to help artists like Littlefield improve their formline design.
“The art is endangered because people are producing stuff that isn’t really that great,” says Boxley. “There are some of us that really want to stem that tide and redirect people back to making good quality formline. And formline, like my grandfather used to tell me, no matter how good the carving is, if the design is bad then the whole thing is bad.”
Once the 7-hour formline class is over, Boxley heads downtown to teach Tsimshian language for 3 more hours.
Close to 20 people have gathered in an empty office space at the Walter Soboleff Building. Boxley has labeled most objects in the room in Tsimshian, and two tables of props for games and activities stand before them. While art and language are related, Boxley says they’re in different states.
“Our art is flourishing. There are hundreds and hundreds of people from different tribes from Yakutat to Seattle who are producing art,” says Boxley.
The language is a different story. Boxley says there are only 50 fluent Tsimshian speakers left.
“Our language is extremely threatened, I mean beyond extremely threatened,” he says.
After instruction from Boxley, the students break out into small groups to practice introductions.
David Russell-Jensen is Tsimshian Killer Whale with roots in Metlakatla and now lives in Juneau. He goes to the University of Alaska Southeast. While studying Tlingit there, he learned about Boxley’s class.
“I think it’s important to be connected to the land you live on but also it’s very important for me to be learning my language because it’s not in that great of state right now so, hoping to work on that,” says Russell-Jensen.
Russell-Jensen embodies Boxley’s hope for the future of Tsimshian language.
“You know it’s not our fault that we speak primarily in English these days, but it will be our fault if the last speaker dies and no one else can do it,” says Boxley.
“Not everyone can be a dancer or a singer, not everyone can be a carver or an artist but everybody talks. So we’re all responsible for the life or death of our language going into the future.”
Both Boxley and the Sealaska Heritage Institute hope to do more Tsimshian language classes in the future. Boxley’s next gig is at home in Washington state, where he’s teaching a mask-making workshop.
Boxley teaches the class how to introduce themselves in Tsimshian. (Photo courtesy Brian Wallace/Sealaska Heritage Institute)
The certificates for the 2015 Mayor’s Awards for the Arts feature Timi Johnson’s “Reflections on Sailing.” It won the 2015 Best in Show award at a juried art show through the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council.
When the awards started in 2007, Bruce Botelho was mayor. Botelho said it was Nancy DeCherney’s idea. She was the newly-appointed executive director of the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council.
“And I think largely to emulate what has been a long standing practice in the state by the State Arts Council with the Governor’s Awards for the Arts,” he said.
Bruce Botelho was mayor when he helped conceive the Mayor’s Awards for the Arts in 2007. (Photo courtesy CBJ)
DeCherney remembers it differently.
“The arts council was in the basement up on Franklin Street and Mayor Botelho came in and just wanted to chat and suggested that one of the things that might be really nice would be if we did a Mayor’s Awards for the Arts to sort of highlight all the wonderful things that go on in the community. So we did,” said DeCherney.
I told her Botelho’s version, and she laughed out loud.
“OK, memory fades. You know how it is,” she said.
Nancy DeCherney began as the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council’s Executive Director in 2006 and helped start the Mayor’s Awards for the Arts. (Photo courtesy of Nancy DeCherney)
The Arts Council chooses the awardees based on nominations from the community. Since 2007, it’s given 48 awards. Photographer Ron Gile will receive this year’s innovation award. He says he might have been chosen because of a Facebook page he helped develop to alert fellow photographers when Romeo the wolf was out and about. Or maybe it’s because of the themed competitions the Juneau Photography Group hosts.
“One of the things about photography is that people get into a niche; they’ll get into a rut is a better way of looking at it,” said Gile. “They’ll shoot one thing and one thing only. Like they’ll go shoot airplanes or they’ll just shoot landscapes. We started a challenge, a bi-weekly challenge, there’s no awards given other than you get to be the next judge for the following challenge.”
The latest challenge is called “Tales from the Jungle.” It urges participants to “capture stories and players in the forests of Southeast.”
“But is was to try and get people to go out of their comfort box, and to try and find new ways of looking at things around us. To break that mold, and to expand and grow as a photographer,” said Gile.
The other six other awards are going to:
• Dancer and teacher Pat Belec,
• arts educator Heather Ridgway
• Juneau Lyric Opera
• Annie Kaill’s for business leadership
• ConocoPhillips Alaska for being a patron of the arts, and
• Juneau Jazz and Classics Executive Director Linda Rosenthal for lifetime achievement.
The free event is casual, begins at the JACC at 5:30. Assemblywoman Debbie White will present the awards in lieu of Mayor Merrill Sanford.
On Friday, Juneau artist MK MacNaughton is hanging portrait number 26 of her project “Grit.” MacNaughton hung the first portrait in early January and says she picks her subjects not for how they look, but for what they do. So far, she’s drawn and hung portraits of electricians, fishermen, firefighters, bus drivers, heavy equipment operators, carpenters and more.
Portrait number 26 of 52 goes up at 4:30 on Friday at the Juneau Arts and Culture Center. It’s of chef and restaurant owner Beau Schooler.
Listen to MacNaughton describe the project see her portraits to date in this video:
Juneau songwriter Liz Snyder brought her enchanting original music and incredible whistling to KTOO’s red carpet for her first live solo performance in two years. Snyder is well known in Southeast Alaska as a member of folk rock duo The Wool Pullers. She pulled out two new songs along with crowd favorite “Garbo Has No Say in This.”
Set List:
“Garbo Has No Say in This”
“Verse by Verse”
“Stop”
The concert was recorded June 12 in the KTOO arts, culture and music office.
Tuesday at 3 on A Juneau Afternoon, Scott Burton hosts.
He’ll talk with Charles McHenry about Wednesday’s Open House at the Juneau Public Health Center;
C. Scott Fry, musician and manager of the Alaskan Hotel and Bar, will be on the show;
Ray Friedlander will be here to highlight the Board Room;
And we’ll talk with Michele Elfers, from the CBJ Engineering Department, about Wednesday’s Community Forum on the Franklin & Front Street Reconstruction Project.
That, Writer’s Almanac, Bird Note, music and more; live at 3 on KTOO-NEWS, repeated at 4 on KRNN, and on-line via ktoo.org
Close
Update notification options
Subscribe to notifications
Subscribe
Get notifications about news related to the topics you care about. You can unsubscribe anytime.
