Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq and Athabascan) is a mixed-media artist whose family hails from the Alaska North Slope community of Utqiagvik and the interior village of Nulato. Her family, cultures, and relationship to the land influences all that she does. Growing up in a rural community, she observed and practiced time-honored traditional women’s and collective labor — skin sewing, beading, and food preparation — that taught her to appreciate the intimacy of intergenerational knowledge and material histories. This collective knowledge deeply informs the materiality, symbolism, and structure of her artistic practice.

Through her mixed-media painting and sculpture, as well as her curation and community engagement, Kelliher-Combs offers a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaskan context. Her work’s imagery and symbolism speak to history, culture, family, and the life of her people. They also speak about abuse, marginalization, and the historical and contemporary struggles of Indigenous peoples, in the North and worldwide. Likewise, the materiality of her work honors the ingenuity of ancestral practices like hide and membrane preparation while examining how materials like plastic or oil are changing the landscape. Her use of synthetic, organic, customary, and contemporary materials moves beyond the binary divisions of Western and Indigenous cultures, self and other, and man and nature to examine the interrelationships and interdependence of these concepts.

Kelliher-Combs is a recipient of the prestigious United States Arts Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, and the Rasmuson Foundation Fellowship, as well as the 2005 Anchorage Mayor’s Arts Award and 2010 Alaska Governor’s Individual Artist Award. Her work is included in the collections of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, British Royal Museum, Anchorage Museum, Alaska State Museum, University of Alaska Museum of the North, Eiteljorg Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and Montclair Art Museum.

Her recent exhibitions include Arctic/Amazon, Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada; Agency, Feminist Art and Power, Museum of Sonoma County, Sonoma, Calif.; Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minn.