Scott Burton, KTOO

Thursday on A Juneau Afternoon, Scott Burton hosts:

Christina Gomez will be on the show to tell us about UAS’s One Campus One Book selection: “Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories.”

Kaia Henrickson, of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, will tell us about Walter Soboleff Day activities.

The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council will highlight the upcoming Wild and Scenic Film Festival.

We’ll meet the Canvas’s new ceramics teacher.

And Nancy DeCherney will be here with Arts Up!

That, Writers Almanac, Bird Note, music and more,
Thursday afternoon on A Juneau Afternoon, live at 3 on KTOO-NEWS, repeated at 4 on KRNN. And available on demand via ktoo.org

Kayla Harmon’s fifth grade class is just in from lunch-recess on a sunny Friday.

With little prompting, the students move to the front of the classroom. Some sit in kid-size chairs and tables, others sit cross-legged on the ground or on pillows.

At the beginning of the school year, 10-year-old Mia Waid asked her teacher if she could play her guitar and sing in front of the class. Harmon agreed.

Waid stands with her guitar on a throw rug. The fluorescent lights are off, and natural light filters in through large windows facing Mount Juneau. Her 26 classmates are silent, focused on her.

Harmon had seen Waid play around town before the fifth grader asked to play for the class.

“She really connects to the songs,” said Harmon. “Some of the topics are more about love or something and she’s a 10-year-old girl, but I always feel like she just really embodies the lyrics that she’s singing, and it’s so believable when she sings it.”

Today, Waid plays four songs including a class favorite called “Rip Tide” by indie-folk artist Vance Joy. Beyond Joy, this 10-year-old’s inspirations may surprise.

“I like the old stuff like Carol King, Bill Withers, Ray Charles and Michael Jackson, of course,” said Waid.

“I think it’s really fun not to necessarily look at her,” said Harmon, “but look at her peers just like, staring at her basically, with a big grin on their face. They’re so focused on listening to her, and I think they know that it’s taken a lot of time and dedication to be as good as she is.”

Among those peers is Cayman Jardell.

“It’s really inspiring. Like, I used to think that I would never be a football player, but after this, I know I think I can,” said Jardell.

And Audrey Noon.

“Mia wrote a song and that inspired me to, like, come up with my own songs ‘cause one of my career choices is a singer,” said Noon.

“When Mia got up there and was really brave it really inspired me to go do stuff and be really brave,” said Andrew Waldron.

Georgia Lawton is inspired too. “When she did her own song, I love playing guitar so it kind of inspired me to do that as well,” said Lawton.

Waid has advice for getting over the jitters, and maybe, life in general.

“Breathe slowly, and I would say, just like, instead of walking backwards, run toward it. Just like, bolt towards it, pretty much. Like a little figurative language,” said Waid with a laugh.

As for her future?

“I actually want to be an archaeologist, but I want the music to pay for my archaeology,” said Waid.

To hear Waid’s music live, keep an eye out. She’s been known to busk around town.

 

Correction: An earlier version of this story contained an incorrect last name for Mia Waid. 

The life-size wooden figure intended to raise awareness of homelessness stolen from outside Juneau’s City Hall has been replaced.

The theft happened last month. Organizers of the nationwide project in Charleston, South Carolina, sent the replacement figure.

Before the original was stolen from outside City Hall, Juneau’s Chief Housing Officer Scott Ciambor had submitted a picture to the project organizers. Their goal was to have a picture with the figure from the city halls of every state capital.

For security reasons, Ciambor says he is going to keep the replacement in his office. He said he’d be happy to discuss homelessness with anyone interested.

Work by Juneau artist Dan DeRoux is in the midst of a competition that could earn him $10,000. The advocacy group Americans for the Arts nominated DeRoux’s “Raindrops” for the contest, which is driven by online votes.

The piece was installed at Gastineau Elementary School on Douglas in 2015.

It’s made up of mirrors and handmade tears of glass several feet long suspended from a hallway ceiling. A skylight illuminates the installation.

“So when I actually got up there on the scaffolding, and had the mirror put in, and got up there and started hanging these pieces — I got about three of them hung and there were all of the sudden, like, a million reflections, “ said DeRoux. “It just was infinite, you know. And you’re standing up there inside a box of mirrors inside this light well — I just got real giddy.”

Deroux has about a dozen pieces of public art in Juneau. He says the most challenging part of this installation was creating the glass raindrops at a foundry in Ashland, Oregon.

“You have a big ball of molten glass on the end of a big rod and you have to drop it off, you have to make sure the neck is the right thickness that you want and still has a big lobe on the end,” said DeRoux. “But you have to stop it in midair. So, hot glass is dropping off of a pipe and you have to make it stop before it hits the ground. So it was really frustrating, as you might imagine, and I lost way more pieces than I made, by far.”

“Raindrops” is among 101 works of public art in the contest that runs until Oct. 31. First, second and third prizes win $10,000, $5,000 and $1,000 respectively. KRIS Wines in Montagna, Italy, is sponsoring the competition.

Grammy nominated artist Matisyahu is performing to a sold out Centennial Hall on Friday night after almost a year of planning. His music blends reggae, beatboxing and alternative styles and hit the top 40 chart in 2005 with a tune called “King Without a Crown.” Thursday night, Matisyahu answered questions at a private event for KTOO members.

One highlight came in response to a question about his creative process while performing live. Matisyahu said it’s about improvisation.

“I am always more interested in sort of not doing the thing that I know will get a reaction, or that will be like good. But actually holding back from doing that, and seeing what new can happen. And that’s sort of a risk because sometimes the songs might just go into nowhere. And nothing happens. But I feel if I keep trying that throughout the course of a show, at some point there’s some kind of like — something, like, breaks open, and then I’m actually able, like, to have a really unique experience with the people that are there.”

Matisyahu spoke to the crowd of 40 people for about 40 minutes. His concert Friday starts at 7:30. If you missed getting tickets, the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council will start putting names on a waitlist at 6:30 p.m.

The show is a joint collaboration between the Juneau Arts and Humanities Council and KTOO, KRNN and KXLL.

It’s a nice afternoon in Juneau as Michael Spoon stands in front of Juneau’s City Hall looking at the abstract figure.

“You can tell it’s a humanoid form. What is this? A bench?” Spoon asks.

The figure is a little taller than Spoon, who’s been homeless in Juneau since December. It’s a plywood cut-out of a person that is part of a national effort to bring awareness to homelessness. The social art project began in Charleston, South Carolina, where the city collaborated with a design firm to create 430 plywood figures — the estimated number of homeless people in the city at the time.

The figures were placed in a park in front of their City Hall. Now, the project has gone national and every state capital has been asked to put a figure in front of their city hall in solidarity.

The figure is hollow to symbolize the invisibility of homeless people, and there’s an image of a bench with a house as a shadow near the figure’s belt line. Spoon didn’t sleep on a bench last night, but close.

“I was sleeping up behind a restaurant this morning. It was blowing like 35, 45 mph and rainin’ — layin’ on cardboard — I had cardboard covering me. I still froze,” Spoon says.

Spoon says he’s been homeless in Juneau 6 or 7 times before, and in several other cities.

“Sitka, back in my hometown, Seward, Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, Seattle, Portland, Oregon, on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, Grimshaw, Milwaukee, Gladstone …”

The figure is next to the large City Hall sign board tourists like to take pictures with. A couple walks by, cameras in hand. Spoon asks the man for a smoke. The man, with a cigarette in his mouth, shakes his head no.

“That’s another issue around here, too, is the drugs,” says Spoon. “I’m an alcoholic but I try and take a break from it once in a while and keep on trying to find work.”

He also says that violence is an issue, but that it’s the same everywhere. Overall, Spoon says that Juneau seems better than some other places.

“You get to wash your clothes and take a shower at the Glory Hole, and they get fed three times a day,” says Spoon. “These other cities I was in, you only got to eat once a day, and you could never use the shower ‘cause someone was always in there — beat you to it or something.”

I ask him what advice he has for Juneau.

“Just keep trying I guess. Find enough resources of what’s around you and try to use ‘em. They’re starting to do the housing thing and stuff. I missed (out by) 5 minutes. Some guy beat me by 5 minutes — he was the last guy to sign up for the housing,” answered Spoon.

The housing Spoon is referring to is Juneau’s housing first facility now under construction in Lemon Creek. The 32-unit building, which should be done in May 2017, is meant for people like Spoon. The idea is that with a stable living environment, people can then address their addictions, get medical attention, find work.

“We’ve had a great community effort in the last five years,” says Scott Ciambor, Juneau’s chief housing officer. He’s among a group of organizers and planners that have made the housing first project a reality.

“This is kind of showing that, unlike the figurine which is supposed to represent invisibility and not seeing homeless people as part of communities, we’ve gotten past that hurdle and are making active choices for solutions,” he says.

If Juneau were to fully emulate Charleston’s project, we’d put out 216 figures — maybe in Marine Park. That’s the number of homeless people counted in Juneau in January. Ciambor is proud of the 32-unit housing first project, but he says we still have more work to do.

“Realistically, that is a small sample targeted to those who are most vulnerable,” Ciambor says. “So there’s still opportunities slightly up the spectrum, more low-income, affordable housing, more supported housing that is not as intensive as that project. And some more private market rentals that social service providers can connect with to put some of their clients in.”

A couple walks by and I ask them what they think of the figure. Beyond the shape of a person, they’re not sure what it is and they don’t know how to use the QR code that links to the project website. I explain it to them. It turns out I am preaching to the choir. Eddie Snell is off a cruise ship from Florida and is active in his community’s efforts to fight homelessness.

“We should not have large numbers of people roaming the streets without receiving some type of help in this country with all the resources we have,” Snell says.

Spoon agrees, but unlike Snell he doesn’t have a stateroom.

“I don’t know where I am going to sleep tonight,” Spoon says.

Ciambor took a picture of the figure and sent it to the project organizers in Charleston. So far, Juneau, Little Rock and Santa Fe have participated. To see the figure, the pictures in this story will have to do — it was stolen the night after I did these interviews. Ciambor has mixed emotions about the theft. He’s glad it has a new home, but he’d like it back.