2023 Individual Artist Awardees
A near-record pool of 417 eligible artists, makers and culture bearers applied for our 2023 awards. Panels of artists and art experts from Outside Alaska evaluated works long distance and convened virtually to select 10 Fellowship and 25 Project Award recipients. The Distinguished Artist is recommended by a group of Alaska artists and art experts in a separate process.
Learn about the 2023 Individual Artist Award recipients, their art and what they are doing next.
Meet the artists!
Learn more about the 2023 awardees and their art. Scroll down for mini profiles of each one. (Film by C+L Creative)
Distinguished Artist
Anna Brown Ehlers
A single $50,000 annual award honors an established artist of recognized stature with decades of creative excellence and accomplishment in the arts.
For more than 30 years, Anna Brown Ehlers has been a recognized master and prolific producer of Chilkat weavings for ongoing ceremonial and cultural use. Her weavings — Chilkat robes, tunics, dancing aprons, dance leggings, bibs, and vests — are featured in the most prestigious and prolific museums worldwide and coveted for private collections. Even more important, Tlingit clans commission Ehlers for at.óowu, or communal sacred objects, fostering social and spiritual balance, or wooch yáxh.
Her weavings are danced, displayed, gifted and studied at memorial potlatches, totem pole raisings, traditional gatherings, canoe journeys and ceremonies. She is a creator of at.óowu, a master artist or aanyádi of her peoples.
Fellowship Awards
Awards of $25,000 allow mid-career or established artists, makers and culture bearers to focus their energy and attention for a one-year period of creative development.
Project Awards
Awards of $10,000 support emerging, mid-career and established artists, makers and culture bearers in specific, short-term projects.
About the award necklace
Each year, Rasmuson Foundation invites a prior-year Individual Artist Award recipient to create unique, hand-crafted necklaces for the current year’s awardees. Award necklaces in 2023 were designed and created by Saxman artist Kenneth “Kelly” White, who explores traditional experiences of storytelling, dancing, carving and drawing. He is largely a self-taught carver. White received an Individual Artist Fellowship Award in 2021.
White is Tlingit of the Teikweidi (Bear Clan) and Tantaa Kwaan (Tongass Tribe) and was raised by the Sanyaa Kwaan (Cape Fox Tribe.)
He carved the Distinguished Artist Award necklace as a paddle from yellow cedar painted with traditional Pacific Northwest Coast colors. For the Fellowship Award, he featured a lovebird design made from maple plywood. The Project Award, also of maple plywood, is a bird wing design. The necklaces also contain early 1900s authentic fine vintage Czech crystal, Russian blue and red glass and African trade beads.
Distinguished Artist
$50,000
A singular award honors an established artist with decades of creative excellence and accomplishment.
Fellowship
$25,000
To allow the artist to focus energy on developing their creative work over a year-long period.
Project Award
$10,000
For a specific, short-term project with clear benefit to the artist.
“Let’s create more …”
This year we asked the awardees what they wanted to create more of. Click play to see their answers. (Film by C+L Creative/Featured photo by awardee Young Kim)
2023 Panelists
The Foundation enlists artists and art experts from around the country and the world to select the awardees. Panel members are all from Outside Alaska, and they change every year. Here are the panelists for 2023:
Nasreen Alkhateeb
Filmmaker
Diedrick Brackens
Textile artist/weaver
Charlotte Brathwaite
Creator/director
RaShaunda Brooks
Filmmaker and organizer
Natalie Diaz
Poet, writer and educator
Tim Doud
Artist and educator
Kate Dumbleton
Festival director, Hyde Park Jazz Festival
Ysabel Y. González
Writer
Lonnie Hutson
Visual artists/crafts person
Vaughn Kimmons
Multidisciplinary artist
Konrad Ng
Cultural curator, scholar
Tunde Olaniran
Multidisciplinary artist
Alice Sheppard
Dancer, choreographer
Michael Sherrill
Sculptor
Buzz Spector
Artist, writer and art editor, december magazine
Riva Symko
Educator
Marty Two Bulls Jr.
Artist and educator
Laura VerMeulen
Arts administrator, musician, maker
Anu Yadav
Playwright, actress, cultural worker
View all artist awardees
Since 2004, Rasmuson Foundation has presented Individual Artist Awards. Learn more about the recipients chosen each year.