SAR Announces 2022-2023 Native Artist Fellows

When one looks at Hollis’ work, the influence of traditional Pueblo pottery becomes apparent and yet he challenges viewers with conceptual and abstract elements. For example, the health and well-being of Native communities is one theme that Chitto interrogates as HIV/Aids and queerness are directly inserted into his work.

While at SAR, Hollis will embark on a soft-sculpture doll project that depicts a two-spirit couple in beaded and quilled regalia.  

While at SAR, Dugi will further study in-depth historic textile materials and techniques. He will complete a garment designed and inspired by weaving and materials found during research of Navajo and ancestral Southwestern tribes. The creative work will consider materials and techniques in utilitarian objects while combining his current disciplines. 

Koyukon Athabascan creative, Janna Avner (she/her), joins the SAR Native Artist Fellowship community as its first practicing light sculpture artist. Using light as her primary medium, Avner seeks to reclaim romanticizations of landscape imagery and incorporate expansive interpretations of Indigeneity, perception, and the environment. Her pieces serve as visual metaphors that, at times, contain projections of beadwork and hologram recreations of the Northern Lights. 

While at SAR, Janna will explore the integration of painting and light sources through the materiality of dichroic films, projection mapping – and, of course, light. She seeks to create the feeling of a displaced body of light as a metaphor for the displacement felt as a multi-heritage Alaska Native.