News Release

Denali National Park and Preserve Selects 2019 Artists-In-Residence

Former Artist-in-Residence Brooks Salzwedel working on a drawing during his residency

NPS Photo

News Release Date: March 18, 2019

Contact: Kathleen Kelly, 907.683.9504

Five artists have been selected as Denali National Park and Preserve’s 2019 Artists-In-Residence.

They will each spend 10 days in the park drawing inspiration and culminating in a public outreach activity. In addition, each artist will donate a piece of artwork to the park’s program collection. Residents are challenged to create pieces, inspired by their park experiences, which offer visitors fresh and innovative perspectives of the park.

Since 2002 almost 80 accomplished artists, writers and composers have participated in the program. Check out a catalog of art donated to the program.

This year’s artists include:
 

• Suzanne Samuels’ fiction and essays have appeared in online and print journals; her nonfiction books have been widely used in college courses on law and politics. She is currently at work on a historical novel, as well as a book about the youngest person to swim across the English Channel and Catalina Channel, and around the island of Manhattan. Samuels’ work at Denali will focus on helping children and youth learn more about the sled dogs and encourage young visitors to think about what it’s like to be a Denali sled dog.

• Ben Justis is a composer whose works have been selected for the Cortona Sessions for New Music, International Double Reed Society, George Lawner Prize, and the New York Electro-Acoustic Music Festival. This summer he will also serve as an Artist-in-Residence at Homestead National Monument of America in Nebraska. Currently, he is pursuing his doctorate in music composition at the University of Kansas.
• Celia Garland is inspired by nature. She is a naturalist and a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology (Glass and Glass Sculpture, BFA). She was a member of the Corning Museum of Glass, Blow Glass at Sea Team and served as a naturalist in Alaska, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
• Brenda Zlamany is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Since 1982 her work has appeared in over a dozen solo exhibitions and numerous group shows in the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Several museums have exhibited her work and Zlamany has collaborated with authors and editors of the New York Times Magazine on several portrait commissions. She has received various grants and a BA from Wesleyan University in 1981.

• Kate Gorman is an Ohio artist who draws on paper and textiles with pencil and pen in ink and thickened dyes. Her visual narratives focus on migration, the passage of time and the fragility and strength of nature. She studies the migration of humans and animals, particularly birds and insects, and while In Denali, she will study the landscape as well as the accessible wildlife, taking notes and drawing, making connections. She will conduct a workshop in observing and in mark-making. Using ink and thread, paper and/or fabric, participants will create a small book as memory-keeper of time spent in Denali.