Juneau artists rack up eight Rasmuson awards. Here’s what three of the winners are creating.

The Rasmuson Foundation announced their list of Individual Artist awardees, and eight Juneau projects made the list. The 50 total awards go to artists across the state, who will receive $10,000 each toward a project they have planned. 

For Juneau-based artists like CJ Harrell, the grants support deeply personal projects. Harrell plans to make block print portraits depicting a dozen of the Southcentral Alaska homes they lived in growing up. 

First, they plan to travel to see the homes as they are now, and meet the current residents. The grant helps pay for that. Harrell said that gives them confidence to take on the project. 

“I realized, like, oh man, this would take me years to save up for otherwise and even that,” they said. “Like, I don’t know if I would be brave enough to do this if I didn’t have that funding and that support.”

The project will delve into themes of poverty and abundance in rural Alaska, including Harrell’s experience growing up with a parent struggling with substance abuse. 

“The experience of being both isolated, but also so surrounded by nature and other wonderful spaces and resources and beauties too,” Harrell said. “And how that can soften the blow when you’re dealing with other challenges.”

Harrell said the project reflects experiences many Alaskans have had, but it’s still uniquely theirs.

Awardee Flordelino Lagundino is also using his grant funding to tell a story he knows intimately. He’s putting on a play with Juneau nonprofit Theater Alaska that he first saw 20 years ago. The Romance of Magno Rubio is about a young Filipino farmworker finding his way in America. And he said the play is quite an undertaking.

“It’s a really, actually difficult script to produce. It’s mostly in poetry,” Lagundino said. “Lots of poetry in it, there’s singing, there’s lots of movement.”

He also received a grant from the Juneau Community Foundation. Lagundino is using some of the funding to fly in a young Filipino director he met when the man was only a high school student, and to hire more Filipino actors to fill out the roles.

Theater Alaska, which he founded with other Juneau thespians in 2020, puts on a lot of shows for free, or by donation. Lagundino said it would have taken years to fundraise to put on a dynamic play like this without grant funding.  

The story is set in California in the 1930s. Lagundino said the setting is familiar to Juneau’s own migrant worker history.

“The workers of this town, a lot of them have been Filipino and helped make this place,” he said.

The Romance of Magno Rubio will run this June and July. 

Rasmuson also awarded Ravenstail Weaver Neech Yanagut Yéil Laine Rinehart a grant for a project he’s been working toward for years: weaving a tunic completely out of jánwu, or mountain goat hair. It’s a traditional material for weaving in Southeast Alaska. Rinehart began collecting the fiber from weaving mentors and naturalists as he learned weaving. 

“The core reality of it is just the relationship that you have to have with other people to make something like this happen,” he said.

And he plans to document the process of using the fiber from its raw material into becoming the woven tunic. 

“It really allows you the ability to slow down and recognize, like, how much work has gone into this craft to get it from, say, the side of a mountain somewhere in Southeast Alaska,” he said. “And then just getting it to that point where you can even spin with it is just such a celebration.”

Rinehart said the grant helps him to financially support himself while devoting time and attention to the project. And he said it gives him the chance to reflect on why working with traditional materials is important to understanding weaving, and Lingít peoples’ long history working with the land and all of its inhabitants.

The Rasmuson Foundation also awarded grants to the following Juneau artists: musicians Annie Bartholomew and the Heists, Drag King Max Stout, Lingít scholar and writer X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell, and the weaving and documentary team Gunaashaa Lisa Fisher and Gemini Waltz Media. The artists have a year to complete the project.