Our vibrant arts scene and rich cultural history are among Juneau’s clear strengths. For generations, residents have supported, created, and maintained a high degree of artistic diversity, ingenuity, and expression. The Foundation’s grant program for artists, the Individual Artist Awards, aims to foster local artists. In its third year of the award program, the Foundation is pleased to announce the four successful applicants: Rico Worl – $10,000, Albert “Laine” Rinehart – $5,000, Christine Carpenter- $2,500, Joshua Fortenbery- $2,500.
Katie Corbus, a member of the Arts Vibrancy Endowment Selection Committee, noted, “I was impressed by the number of applicants in each grant level, as well as the caliber of their proposals. Making final selections was a challenging process, but it was exciting and encouraging to see the variety of projects being pursued and developed by our talented local artists.”
Rico Worl’s project is the creation of a physical sculpture with a digital aspect. Worl will design a bronze sculpture in traditional Tlingit style which will also have digital art augmented over the physical piece. The digital art will be viewable through mobile devices.
Laine Rinehart’s planned project includes using mountain goat wool to make a sleeved tunic or kudas’. This undertaking will be the culmination of the artists’ immersion into the details of working with mountain goat wool over the last five years – from the harvesting, processing it for wool, spinning the wool and weaving the tunic. It is the artist’s hope to be able to pass on the knowledge and skills gained from this project to future generations.
Christine Carpenter, having refueled her pandemic-tempered creativity, will use her watercolors and pens to intimately explore the big picture and minute details from several solo trips throughout the year to Windfall Lake Cabin. Her show, tentatively titled “Changing Landscapes”— on exhibit at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum in January 2023—is a project about process and growth of both the landscape and artist. Carpenter aims to examine the themes of place; climate change; isolation; disconnection from technology; and mental health.
Joshua Fortenbery will use this award to record an album of original songs, enlisting the help of talented friends in the Juneau music community. The album will be a self-absorbed, neurotic appraisal of isolation, misinformation, family, and death. An existential crisis set to music.
The Individual Artist Awards are made possible through the Foundation’s Arts Vibrancy Endowment. This endowment was created to foster our dynamic arts culture for generations to come and is a Foundation priority. For more information or to give to the endowment, visit http://www.juneaucf.org.
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- A glimpse of Changing Landscapes by Christine Carpenter.
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- Josh Fortenbery at work on Another Existential Crisis.
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- Sneak peek at Rico Worl’s Raven’s Escape, a digitally augmented sculpture.
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- Goat warp that will be incorporated into Laine Rinehart’s Kudas’.
