Rebecca Lyon, the 2026 Distinguished Artist, sits on the beach at the Kenaitze River. (Photo by Brad Hillwig)

Anchorage-based mixed media artist Rebecca Lyon is the recipient of Rasmuson Foundation’s 2026 Distinguished Artist award. The recognition includes a $50,000 grant to honor a lifetime of creative excellence. The award is the Foundation’s highest recognition for an Alaska artist. 

The Distinguished Artist Award is part of the Foundation’s Individual Artist Awards program. It celebrates one artist each year whose work has made a lasting impact on Alaska’s arts landscape. A panel of professional artists, arts administrators, and arts scholars from throughout Alaska reviews, endorses, and selects a winner from artist nominations. 

In conjunction with a celebration of its 2026 Distinguished Artist, Rasmuson Foundation is releasing an original short documentary about Lyon’s life and work, Lyon of the North.  

Lyon’s art incorporates a variety of media and approaches, including painting, carving, metalwork, and screen printing, to articulate ideas about Native rights, women’s rights, environmental concerns, and being Alaska Native. She blends natural materials like wood and metal with plastics and found objects to create works like Counting on Liberty, which combines a modern version of a Dena’ina Athabascan counting cord, an image of Lyon’s great grandmother, and the iconography of the Statue of Liberty to address the complexity of women’s and Native rights. Her work is held in the collection of the Anchorage Museum and the Pratt Museum in Alaska and the Musée Boulogne-sur-Mer in France. 

Born in Cordova, Lyon is Dena’ina Athabascan and Unangan. She grew up witnessing the advocacy of both her grandmother, Alice Brown, a Kenaitze Dena’ina champion of civil rights involved in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and her mother, Joan Elva Naines, a leader in her own right. Lyon recalls attending early meetings of the Alaska Federation of Natives as a child, given a pencil and paper and told to be quiet. “I found a safe place with paper and a pencil,” she said. 

From this early combination of art and advocacy, Lyon grew her artistic practice, producing mixed media pieces that directly address urgent cultural and political issues. Prior to studying art at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Lyon was an electrician and a mother who eventually dedicated herself full-time to her practice in her late 30s. She has exhibited in Alaska, Nevada, Massachusetts, New York, France, and Finland. Public artworks are installed on the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail and at Russian Jack Elementary school in Anchorage. In 2016, she received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship Award.  

The Distinguished Artist Award includes a $50,000 unrestricted grant. It is the top honor in Rasmuson Foundation’s support of Alaska’s creative leaders. 

Click here for more information about the Individual Artist Awards and past recipients.