Lectures

Join us for lectures from artists, experts, and other compelling voices on wide-ranging topics. Check back for upcoming events and purchase tickets online.

The Power of Images: Alaska and the Pacific Northwest Through the Eyes of Artists

Wednesday, October 15th, 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Paintings have not just beauty, but power, and paintings of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest have helped shape what we see when we look at the landscape of our region and what we feel about our relationship to it. For almost half a century I have written and talked about the way artists shape, subtly but powerfully, how we think about our home and our place in it. Artists in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest have painted subjects in common for more than a century and a half, but each of their bodies of work says something different about what this place means. Through discussion of images from the promised Garvey bequest and others, I will urge listeners to ask not just what did these artists depict, but what did they say, and how has their worked shaped the way we see the place in which we live.

About the Speaker:

An Alaska resident since 1977, Kesler Woodward served as Curator of Visual Arts at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau and as Artistic Director of the Visual Arts Center of Alaska in Anchorage before moving to Fairbanks in 1981. From 1981 to 2000 he was on the faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he served as Department Chair and Head of the Division of Arts and Communications. 

Woodward retired from teaching in 2000 as Professor of Art Emeritus at the University of Alaska. He has continued to serve on graduate thesis committees in both the Art Department and the Department of Northern Studies and as the Academic Affiliate for the University of Alaska Museum of the North. 

Since 1990 Woodward has published six books on Alaskan art, including the first comprehensive survey of the fine arts in Alaska, Painting in the North, which was published by the Anchorage Museum and University of Washington Press in 1993. He has organized retrospective exhibitions of the work of Alaska’s best known historical artists which have traveled to museums throughout Alaska and down the west coast to California, and he has lectured on the art of the circumpolar north from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest to Georgia, New England, and the British Museum in London. 

In 2004, Kesler Woodward received the first Alaska Governor’s Art Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

Cascadia’s Curator Presents at

Smithsonian American Art Museum

David Martin, curator at Cascadia, discussed his work recovering histories of Asian American Artists of the Pacific Northwest as part of a panel discussion at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) on March 14, 2025. The program, Rediscovering Asian American Art Panel Conversation, brought together three scholars who have worked to illuminate the contributions of twentieth-century Asian American artists.

More About David Martin
Martin is the leading authority on early Washington state art and artists. Many of the artists he has chosen to highlight are women, Japanese and Chinese Americans, gay, lesbian and other minorities who had established national and international reputations during the period 1890-1960.

Rediscovering Asian American Art Panel Conversation video courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum (March 14, 2025)