Door 15

F Magazine Covers Forum-Supported Hip-Hop Artist

The current issue of Anchorage-based monthly F Magazine, which covers arts, music and culture throughout Alaska, is a hop-hop theme issue inviting readers to "explore Alaska's urban culture with our in-depth look at the 49th state's hip-hop and rap scene."

It features a four-page spread on Inupiaq performance artist, playwright and rapper Allison Warden, who is creating a Forum-supported hip-hop album titled Inupiaq Ingenuity Through Time—An Oral History Made Fresh for the Youth.

For the project Warden is interviewing Inqupiaq elders and then transforming their traditional stories into hip-hop tracks.

“Before, the elders were in charge of passing on history, but now they are focusing on other things. They’re worried about hunting and subsistence instead. There are very few voices now to relate to our perspective,” Warden told F Magazine contributor Riza Brown.

“We’re like an endangered species. We have a responsibility to fight for our culture, to actively learn the language and the ways of the land, because if we don’t, we will lose all of that.”

Also in the story, Warden relates the mind-bending experience of being one of only two Inupiaq she knew to be living in New York City.

What tripped me out was that out of eight million people, there were only two Inupiaq. Me and Andrew MacLane [a well-known filmmaker and playwright from Barrow]. He lived on the other side of town so we rarely got to see each other. I felt, more than ever, that I had to be the most village I could possibly be. I would call my cousin three times a week so I wouldn’t lose my accent. It was really scary for me because it put into perspective how small my community actually is.

In addition to working on Ingenuity Through Time, Warden is finishing up “Calling All Polar Bears,” a 30-minute performance art show that addresses global warming and the resulting loss of sea ice in the Arctic.

Earlier this year Warden previewed a hip-hop piece from the show Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James Leach during his May visit to Alaska. In the song, “Where Did All the Ice Go?”, Warden raps from the perspective of a drowning polar bear.

Leach praised the piece as “haunting, powerful, thoroughly original work.”

 

New Leadership Anchorage Director Profiled

The weekly Anchorage Press recently profiled new Leadership Anchorage director Larry Campbell, a veteran Alaska journalist and educator who began work at the Forum earlier this month.

"Somewhere amongst the clutter in Larry Campbell's sock drawer is a Pulitzer Prize medal for excellence in newspaper journalism," begins the feature story.

It's headlined "Bagpipes and Pulitzers," a reference to Campbell's award-winning journalism career and his having learned to play a family heirloom set of bagpipes. Campbell, a bit of a renaissance man, also formerly worked as an ambulance driver and designed gold nugget jewelry for a downtown Anchorage jeweler.

But Campbell is best known for his years as a staff writer for the Anchorage Daily News during the newspaper's 1980s heyday, followed by his work as the Alaska Bureau Chief for the Associated Press and then at UAA, where he became Chair of the Journalism and Communications Department.

Anchorage Press Cover Story Features Leadership Anchorage Project

The current issue of the Anchorage Press features a cover story on Portraits, a graphic novel depicting five stories of the lives and personal struggles of a diverse group of immigrants living in Alaska.

Portraits is the result of a partnership between the Alaska Humanities Forum’s Leadership Anchorage program, the Alaska Immigration Justice Project and the University of Alaska Anchorage Center for Community Engagement and Learning.

“UAA students and Leadership Anchorage participants paired up into five teams and each participant worked 100 to 150 hours over 10 months planning, interviewing, sketching and writing in order to put the novel together,” reports Anchorage Press features writer Susy Buchanan.