Since the 1990s, Anchorage-based artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs has produced a singular body of paintings and sculptures that weaves together the lived experiences of Alaska Native Peoples and the histories of unresolved colonial violence, through a hybrid materiality that merges craft, found objects, and animal viscera. Kelliher-Combs repeatedly returns to the form of walrus tusk, historically found on Iñupiaq Parkas. In her large-scale sculptural installations, the symbol of walrus tusk is restaged as the potent site at which obscured memories and histories of settler violence are laid bare. The artificial recreation and replication of American flags and maps further advances Kelliher-Combs’s negotiation and contestation of Western notions of purity and authenticity often weaponized in anthropological and museological contexts.
Kelliher-Combs appropriates organic materials derived from subsistence hunting in her painting and sculptures, evoking scarred skins and exposed intestines, which are rendered all the more uncanny by the layering of synthetic materials. The resulting visceral forms mark the permeable boundary between historical tragedies of lost lives and present activities of mourning and grievance, human and non-human agents, and self and the environment. Often inviting interventions from family and community members, Kelliher-Combs speculates on another world that mines experiences from a traumatic past toward a reparative future.
Sonya Kelliher-Combs (b. 1969, Alaska) is an Iñupiaq and Athabascan multidisciplinary artist based in Anchorage, Alaska. She holds a BFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and an MFA from Arizona State University. A forthcoming monograph of her work will be published by Hirmer Verlag in spring 2024, edited by Julie Decker, Ph.D. Her solo exhibitions include Yukon Arts Center, Canada (2019); Minus Space, Brooklyn (2019); Carrie McLain Museum, Nome, AK (2016, 1994, 1990); International Gallery of Contemporary Art, Anchorage, AK (2015); Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH (2014); UC Davis, CA (2012); Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, NM (2011); National Museum of Indian Art, New York, NY (2010); and Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, AK (2005). Past group exhibitions include The Visceral Trilogy, Alaska State Museum, Juneau, Alaska (2023), Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax and The Power Plant, Toronto (2022-3), Heart of Our People, Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN (2019); Art for a New Understanding, Crystal Bridges, AK (2018); SITELINES: Much Wider Than a Line, SITE Santa Fe, NM (2016); Changing Hands 2: Art without Reservation, Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2005). She is a recipient of the United States Arts Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, Rasmuson Fellowship, Anchorage Mayor’s Arts Award and Alaska Governor’s Individual Artist Award. Her work is included in the collections of Anchorage Museum, Alaska State Museum, Denver Art Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Forge Project, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, National Museum of the American Indian, University of Alaska Museum of the North, and Whitney Museum of American Art.
