By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Using fish skins as a medium for artwork that tells a story of food systems, community bonds and climate change, Ilgavak, already an award-winning Sitka artist, earned another accolade for his work last week.
Ilgavak, who had worked with sea mammal fur for years before transitioning to fish skins, has won an Individual Artist Award fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation. The award includes an $18,000 grant.
“One of the things that’s really special and unique about receiving fellowships is that it gives you flexibility,” Ilgavak told the Sentinel on Friday. “As an artist, I can’t support myself fully by making and selling art, but I get to support myself through grants and fellowships, to support various things that I’m doing. So I’ve been continuing to learn and experiment and create visual art out of fish skin.”
Ilgavak holds one of his fish skin pieces in his home studio in February. (Sentinel Photo by James Poulson)
In some of his recent artwork, he’s turned the skins of Redoubt Lake sockeye salmon into wall hangings. He plans to add coho and halibut to his repertoire as well, and has learned to tan the skins by traditional means using hemlock bark and urine.
Though he’s made a hood for a parka, most of Ilgavak’s work is more decorative. As he did when working with sea otter fur, he uses his art as a way to tell a story and engage in conversations about people’s relationships with the world.
“I haven’t expanded more on the parka,” he said. “But mostly what I make is wall art, sewing tapestries, stitching pieces of skins together and stretching (them) over a canvas stretcher bar and having the shapes and colors be kind of the visual piece, and have a conversation about these materials and the culture around them.”
He credited the Yup’ik artist Marlene Nelson and Athabaskan artist Audrey Armstrong with teaching him the art of stitching salmon skins.
Along with his work in fish skin, he has published stories in First Alaskans magazine, often focusing on the impact of climate change on food systems and rivers.
“I’m writing things about climate change, especially on the effect that it has on Indigenous food systems and also on our environments,” he said during an interview at Sitka National Historic Park. “Also using salmon skins to talk about warming water temperatures in the rivers, that are killing otherwise really healthy salmon, just killing them when they enter the rivers. Creating pieces like that, I’ve been kind of having that dialogue, and I want to continue to do more of that.”
He’s one of 37 Alaskans who received the Rasmuson Individual Artist Award this year, though only ten of them got the $18,000 prize. A $7,500 check went out to 25 artists, while Fairbanks-based photographer James Barker took home a $40,000 award. Sitka musician Zak Dylan won a $7,500 award to complete a recording studio.
More information on the Rasmuson awards is available at https://www.rasmuson.org/arts/individual-artist-awards/2022-artists/.
Back in January, Ilgavak won a $50,000 grant and fellowship from the United States Artists organization.
For Ilgavak, fellowships give him a novel degree of flexibility. He’s interested in eventually writing a book.
“I think what is really great about fellowship support is that it also gives me flexibility to do things. I’m going to work on what I wrote about in my project, which is continuing understanding and knowledge and sharing that knowledge as well, around traditional fish skin tanning and sewing and artwork techniques,” he said. “I also put in there that I’m putting the focus on climate change, and the intersection… but I’m also really feeling more wanting to write as well.”
In his writing, he hopes “to express Native ways of knowing, but doing so through Native voices and the Native lens largely for a Native audience. Which is kind of wild to say that that’s unique, but there isn’t. There aren’t a lot of books out there that fit that.”
Though he’s lived in Sitka for many years, Ilgavak is Yup’ik and was born in Akiak, a Kuskokwim River town not far upstream from Bethel. In recent years, the vital returns of king and chum salmon in the Kuskokwim and Yukon rivers have plummeted, thereby reinforcing Ilgavak’s artistic mission. Local fisheries have been shut down repeatedly in recent years because salmon runs in Western Alaska have failed to meet escapement goals.
“It’s illegal for people to harvest their traditional foods while drag netters (the Bering Sea pollock trawl fleet) can get more than they should… It makes me cry. It feels worse than death because death is a very natural cycle that is not the end, but if we talk about removing something then that is kind of the end,” he said.
Ilgavak traveled north this summer during one of the brief fishing openers on the Kuskokwim. While there, he fished with his uncle, Mike Williams, who is chairman of the Kuskokwim River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission.
“I fished that (June opener) with my uncle and it was the happiest I’ve seen him and it was just such an amazing moment,” Ilgavak recalled. “And he gave me the most amount of crap that he’s ever given me – which is like a good sign that he’s having a blast. And we were having a blast together.”
He chose fish skin as a medium, he noted, in part to link his artwork to his food network.
“It’s rooted in my relationship with harvesting my own materials that’s also very nutrition system focused, for myself and the community and family. And in return, creating artwork to help ensure those beings… will be (present) for future generations.”
Moving forward, he’d like to continue his fish skin work, but hopes to write more as well.
“I’m wanting to write more, and then also trying to cross over with climate change and ecological collapse like that – doing that crossover, visually, and literally,” he said.
