About the Artist

Rebecca 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.

2016 Fellowship Award

Lyon will travel to Europe, visit museums and attend the Facing Forward: Contemporary Alaskan Art Goes Abroad show in France.