Scott Burton, KTOO

The Juneau Arts and Humanities Council’s Wearable Art show is this weekend at Centennial Hall. Now in its fourteenth year, the theme is “Technicolor” and artists have been preparing for months. KTOO caught up with three of the participants and filmed short profiles. Meet David Walker.

The Juneau Arts and Humanities Council’s Wearable Art show is this weekend at Centennial Hall. Now in its fourteenth year, the theme is “Technicolor” and artists have been preparing for months. KTOO caught up with three of the participants and filmed short profiles. Meet Kathy Kartchner.

The Juneau Arts and Humanities Council’s Wearable Art show is this weekend at Centennial Hall. Now in its fourteenth year, the theme is “Technicolor” and artists have been preparing for months. KTOO caught up with three of the participants and filmed short profiles. Meet Teresa Busch.

Sarah Conarro’s installation, “Nice Looking,” will culminate Thursday, January 30th, and Friday, January 31st at the Rookery in Juneau. A collaboration with Julian Bozeman, a New York artist and carpenter, the experience will include dinner, music, and light projection.

Click here for more information.

In 2011, Juneau lost a valued teacher and community member, Bethany Bereman, to ovarian cancer. Bereman was known for her love of the outdoors, her work in theater, and her inspirational teaching style. Now there will be a scholarship in her name for older high school students and beginning college students with an established interest in theater. Bereman’s friend and colleague, Kristen Garot, kicked off the memorial scholarship drive during December’s Gallery Walk and raised about half of the first year goal.

Looking for inspirational ideas on how to spend your next big birthday? Theater producer and teacher Kristen Garot has an idea.

“So what we’re looking at tonight is a collection of about 40 plus Juneau artists’ work. It’s my fortieth birthday, so I decided I wanted to collect forty things, or have forty folks contribute. So the silent auction will go until about eight, and Susu and the Prophets, Shona’s band, will start playing around seven and we’ll have a fun dance party,” says Garot.

The art work is displayed in the JACC’s main hall. People walk from piece to piece admiring the work and bidding.

“There’s great collection of masks from Heather Ridgeway’s art students. I wanted to get some current students involved as well as alumni as well as professional artists who have been practicing for a long time. So there’s JDHS grad Brittany Kutterbach, TMHS graduates Lindsay Smithberg and Paris Donohoe, and there are established artists like Rob Roys and MK MacNaughton,” says Garot.

Bethany Bereman taught drama at Juneau-Douglas High School for eight years. Garot says Bereman inspired her to become a theater teacher and producer.

“I think the thing that really struck me was Bethany’s dedication to helping kids. Not just kids who were interested in theater, but any kid who she could make a connection with she would. And she would make connections with kids who struggled making connections with adults. That was a great role model for me to see in the school.”

Among the artists featured in the show is Thunder Mountain High School art teacher Heather Ridgeway. She recalls seeing Bereman’s ability to make connections in action when she walked in on one of her classes one day.

“She had probably forty kids in the dance room at JDHS and they were all sitting on the floor. It was all sort of a relaxed, casual environment and yet they were dead quiet, 100 percent focused on her. She stood in the middle of the room. She was telling a story about how important it was to use dramatic emotional hooks when you are presenting to people in any situation and she was making a connection between her outdoor guiding and theater and the kids were really listening,” says Ridgeway.

Ridgeway says Bereman’s teaching extended beyond the classroom.

“One of the first things she wanted to teach them was to have self respect and self discipline. Not just in theater but in all parts of their life—especially in relationships. And I think drama really helped drive that home for a lot of her students. She brought a lot of kids to a potential they might not have met on their own.”

While the JAHC will be in charge of selection and distributing the funds, Ridgeway has a few ideas on the kind of person Bereman might have chosen.

“Someone that has had to blossom and find themselves and learn the worth of self-discipline and self-confidence in the act of working in theater and drama.”

Garot’s first fundraiser for the Bethany Bereman Memorial Scholarship for Theater Arts Students brought in 5-thousand dollars, half of the 10-thousand dollar goal.

 

To link to the JAHC’s website and to contribute to the scholarship click here.

This Friday at Hearthside Books, Juneau writer and UAS assistant professor of English, Ernestine Hayes, will release her book “Juneau” from Arcadia Publishing. A departure from her customary work in prose, “Juneau” is primarily a pictorial history of what is now Alaska’s capital.

“I had no idea what I was getting into,” Hayes says laughing at a talk about the new book at the downtown library. Conforming to the publisher’s strict, formulaic guidelines, word counts, and finding the right high-resolution photographs was challenging.

“With my other books I just sat down and wrote and then I revised, and revised, and revised, and I thought that was a lot of work. But I didn’t know anything,” she says.

She says the second reason she chose to do the project was more proactive.

“Just as we have to be together going into the future, we have been together from the past—at least from contact forward, we’ve been together. The history of Alaska is too often presented as a whole bunch of  prehistory and then the Russians came. Right? And then is started to be history. I’ve seen too much of that and I didn’t want that to happen again. That’s why I accepted the project.”

While the book illustrates Alaska Native life in what is now Juneau and colonial attitudes that were present, Hayes says she does not focus on this. In fact, many of the pictures, and much of the written history are from Russian and US history forward.

“But I did put in one of the chapters and made it clear in other captions and comments and discussions that, you know, I acknowledge the history of the original people that have been here since time immemorial and do it as though it is an unremarkable fact. Which it is. It’s just something we should all know.”

Speaking of knowledge, Hayes says the most rewarding part of the project was learning.

“Even though I’d played in the mine when I was a girl, and run up and down the stairs at the A.J. and explored tunnels and trestles all over of Mt. Juneau and Mt. Roberts, I didn’t really know about the history and the people who were part of that all those mining efforts. Learning about that history was rewarding for me. I learned a lot about Juneau.”

Hayes writes about being a little girl in Juneau in another book of hers, the 2006 American Book Award winning memoir Blonde Indian—perhaps her best known work. When asked if that’s the work she’s most proud of, she mentions an essay titled “Winter in Lingit Aani Brings Magpies and Ravens.”

Here’s an excerpt from the piece:

“My grandmother instructed me about spiders, don’t hurt them she warned, learn from them. Watch them. Learn. Spiders greet the world early, they wake and get busy early in the day and early in spring. While the more familiar admonition for those that would lead a correct life is to wake before the ravens, rising before the spiders behooves us even more. The industry of spiders exemplifies right living.”

She says to pay attention to the metaphors in that essay.

“I think that’s the indigenous understanding. It’s not so much being able to see the connections, or being able to appreciate or experience the natural world, but it’s being able to recognize all those metaphors.”

It’s not uncommon for Hayes to speak of metaphors and similes—she teaches a full load of composition and creative writing courses at the university. Student Richard Radford has taken several courses from Hayes.

“I’ve really enjoyed all the classes and everything I’ve done with her. She’s really, really talented. She’s a really gifted writer, and a really gifted reader, and a very gifted editor. I would say she’s the most talented I’ve ever worked with,” says Radford.

With the holiday break coming up, Hayes is excited about some free time to work on a fictional extension of the character Old Tom in Blonde Indian, and a contemplative memoir called the Dao of Raven that retells one of the raven stories from a different perspective. And for those of you who are excited for more prose from Hayes, look in the new book Juneau. Even in the captions and short narratives one can hear Hayes’s literary voice.

As part of Gallery Walk, Hayes will be signing copies of “Juneau” this Friday at Hearthside Books from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m..