UAS professor Wayne Price named Rasmuson Foundation’s 2020 distinguished artist

Honoring a lifetime of creative excellence and outstanding contribution to Alaska’s arts and culture the Rasmuson Foundation has named Wayne Aayaank’i Price its 2020 Distinguished Artist. Price is a Tlingit Master Carver, who is a member of the Wooshkeetaan clan and an associate professor of Northwest Coast Art at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau.

“Wayne Price represents the best of Alaska art and artists,” said Diane Kaplan, Rasmuson Foundation president and CEO in a press release. “He’s preserved and replicated traditional Tlingit art with remarkable attention to detail. He creates his own designs in mediums from cedar to silver. And he is a mentor to the young, teaching ways to sobriety and good health. Build a canoe with Wayne and you’ll not only learn to carve, your life will be forever changed. We are so proud to honor Wayne.”

At UAS, Price teaches all elements of carving: selection of trees and properties of wood, fabrication of tools and rules for formline designs, as well as specific skills needed to create works including canoe paddles, feast dishes and bentwood boxes. He is renowned for the artistry and precision of his formline work and has helped revive the knowledge and techniques required to carve traditional ocean-going canoes.

Price was born in Juneau and grew up in Haines. He began carving at Alaska Indian Arts in his teens. He has carved more than 30 traditional and non-traditional totems. He owns the Silver Cloud Art Center in Haines, and is a featured artist in the UAS Egan Library Northwest Coast Art Collection. In addition to totems, Price uses his skills to create canoes and paddles, masks, boxes, drums, and regalia for dance and ceremonies.

Early in his career, Price restored 26 historic totem poles in the village of Saxman, near Ketchikan. His other notable historic projects include duplication of the famous Chief Shakes House posts in Wrangell and restoration of a totem pole in Auke Bay that was carved with support of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Price has a lifelong fascination with traditional ocean-going dugout canoes. He taught himself to carve them through observing surviving examples and experimentation, and became a preeminent expert in the form. He designed and carved two 40-foot dugouts for traditional Native repatriation ceremonies at Glacier Bay National Park in 2016. The Hokkaido Museum of Japan has one of Price’s canoes on permanent display.

Price’s body of original work includes totem poles at Thunder Mountain High School and Tlingit & Haida Vocational Technical School in Juneau, house posts for the U.S. Forest Service building in Auke Bay, items in the collections of the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage and Denali National Park Visitor Center, etched formline glass panels in downtown Juneau, and traditional texture adzing on clan house walls at the Sealaska Heritage Walter Soboleff building in Juneau.

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