Out with the old and in with the new.
The mural featuring a timeline of Anchorage was painted over yesterday so that a new mural by artist Crystal Worl can be painted in its place on a building owned by Barbara and Larry Cash.
The new mural will honor Native culture and is part of a “reindigenization” of downtown. Worl’s mural is a project of the Anchorage Museum, Anchorage Downtown Partnership, Alaska Pacific University, Roadmap for a Vital and Safe Anchorage, and SALT, LLC.
Bob Patterson painted the old mural, called “Anchorage History” across the 120-foot width of the building that faces the City Hall parking lot. In the old mural, several turning point events were highlighted, including the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778. But the timeline stopped in 1997, the year the mural was painted.
“While the original mural accurately depicts events throughout Anchorage’s history, it fails to include the perspectives of Indigenous Peoples; this is where the new mural will serve the community,” said the explanation from Alaska Pacific University, which describes the new project as “Indigenizing the G Street mural.”
“This is a tremendous opportunity to really look at the longer history of this space,” Anchorage resident, Amanda Moser, said in the explanation at APU. “Alaska’s Indigenous people are still here and still driving change and moving things forward in Anchorage.”
Tlingit-Athabascan-Yupik and Filipina, Worl lives in Juneau and is the co-owner of The Trickster company with her brother. She recently painted a mural depicting Native leader Elizabeth Peratrovich on the side of the Juneau library.
The mural to be painted has a lot more color than the old one. A representation of it is shown here:
