The Alaska State Museum is open with FREE admission
Friday, September 5th from 4:00 to 7:00 pm
The Human Imagination Beneath the Boreal Forest
a talk with Corinna Cook at 7:00 pm in the APK Lecture Hall
The boreal forest forms the world’s largest land biome, accounting for one third of all forest on Earth, and stretching across the majority of Interior Alaska. For more than a year and a half, 44 artists studied it alongside scientists, examining how the forest’s ecology and inhabitants have interacted and changed over time. Their work, including an essay by Corinna, is featured in the exhibition In a Time of Change (ITOC): Boreal Forest Stories.
Many historical narratives center war and famine. But this framing tends to omit another human legacy, one that involves rhythms of cooperative labor, song, and rest. In Corinna’s talk, Alaska-Yukon archaeology will offer a window into some of our ancient and more collaborative human inheritances. Corinna will draw on rock and soil to look at disaster, migration, and kindness. She will speak about her role in the exhibition and ask human questions with a geologic sense of time.
Corinna’s essay, “A Triangle of Sun,” which appears in the exhibition, collages fragments of her own writing with notebook excerpts from eleven other ITOC participants. The essay is nested inside a sculptural work by book artist Oralee Nudson, who dried out a core sample of frozen peat to create a book cover representing compressed time.
Corinna Cook is the author of Leavetakings (2020) and Permafrost Is an Archive (coming out in 2026). She is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship awardee, a former Fulbright Fellow, an Alaska Literary Award recipient, and a Rasmuson Foundation grantee. Her current project explores the early years of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission. Corinna serves as nonfiction faculty in Alaska Pacific University’s low-res MFA program in creative writing. More at corinnacook.com.
ITOC: Boreal Forest Stories was made possible with funding from the National Science Foundation through the Bonanza Creek Long Term Ecological Research Program with additional support from the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, the University of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology, the Rasmuson Foundation through the Harper Arts Touring Fund – administered by the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and other sponsors.
The boreal forest forms the world’s largest land biome, accounting for one third of all forest on Earth and stretching across the majority of Interior Alaska
