Art for art’s sake—that’s how Mary Bradshaw characterizes a new show at the Anchorage Museum. Bradshaw, director of visual arts at the Yukon Arts Centre, was invited as a guest curator to jury more than 200 entries for the 2025 Alaska Triennial, but she did so through a blind selection process. That means she didn’t know artist names, locations, backgrounds, training, or anything more than a list of materials and a brief statement on each submission.
“It was so interesting having all of that removed,” Bradshaw says over the phone, a week after the opening of the show, which celebrates place and encourages new works from Alaskan artists. Bradshaw has juried many exhibitions and prizes in the past, but says she’s never done it with so little information on the artists behind the art. “Some of it was giving me anxiety … I ended up with 47 [artists] and I could have chosen all Anchorage artists because you don’t even get that level of detail in the process.”
She didn’t, though. In the end, the 47 artists featured in the show come from Juneau, Anchorage, Nome, Fairbanks, Homer, the Mat-Su Valley, and beyond.
Just as diverse as location, Bradshaw says, were the artistic approaches across applications.
“There were so many practices happening which was exciting,” she says. “I was really impressed with it … there was a huge diversity of materials present in applications and artists who are masters within those materials.”
Bradshaw looked at woodworking, ceramics, fibre art, beadwork, painting and photography. One of the common themes, despite the different materials, was a sense of place, she says. A lot of the images hit home in that they felt like the North Bradshaw herself knows. They didn’t have to be landscapes to convey that feeling either.
Jacob Wilson, for example, submitted drawings of clouds that he made using graphite dust, the byproduct of a mine in Nome.
“He has made these ethereal images from mining cast-offs,” Bradshaw says.
Meanwhile, Melanie Lombard, an artist from Eagle River, made cyanotypes (a sort of camera-less photograph) of Devil’s Club that rendered the plant in frilled, frosty shades of blue and white so they looked frozen. That was a fun play on how northerners relate to seasons, says Bradshaw, because cyanotype is something that’s typically done in the summer, with the help of sunlight.
The opportunity also introduced her to a ton of new work. Some of her favourites ended up not being accepted to the show, just because it was so difficult to narrow the exhibition down to 47 from 500 individual pieces. However, she’s hopeful the experience could lead to some of those artists showing their work at the Yukon Arts Centre in the future.
“It was such a treat to have a bit of a window into what artists are doing in Alaska,” Bradshaw says.
