June 23, 2005
‘Grandness and simplicity’: Burke exhibit shows the pristine beauty of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Doubled in size through a recent renovation, the Burke Museum’s Special Exhibits Gallery will reopen this weekend with a nationally praised exhibit of photography from one of the most beautiful, pristine and remote regions of the world.
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land comprises 49 color images taken over the course of two years by photographer Subhankar Banerjee in the 19.5 million-acre expanse, which includes both arctic and subarctic ecological zones and is one of the last untouched ecosystems in the world.
A sweeping display that explores connections between the area’s native populations and the land, wildlife and water, the exhibit is of great scope and meaning, to both the photographer and the museum. The images have been called “stunningly beautiful” and “epic” by art critics from The New York Times and The New Yorker, respectively.
“This is the first time the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge exhibit has been shown in its entirety in the Northwest, giving a full sense of the photographer’s experience — Banerjee hand-selected the images, and his original text accompanies them,” said MaryAnn Barron, director of communications for the Burke Museum, formally called the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. “By its very nature, this exhibit reveals that there is a richness of life in the Arctic Refuge.”
The exhibit will remain up until Dec. 31, with special programs offered along the way. In conjunction with the exhibit’s opening, the Burke will hold a weekend of family activities on Saturday and Sunday, June 25 and 26.
Featured will be storyteller Sarah James, a member of the Gwich’in tribe who speaks on indigenous rights, human rights and environmental issues. James will talk at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on both days. Family activities and environmental displays also will be set up both days for public perusal.
Also opening on June 25, complementing the exhibit of Banerjee’s photographs and running until Sept. 5, will be the Burke’s own display, Life Abounds: Arctic Native Wildlife Art. This will present more than 90 pieces of art depicting Arctic animals, including carvings, prints and masks from the Burke’s collection and that of John Price and his wife, Joyce. Price, who also served as co-curator of Life Abounds, will lead public tours of that exhibit at noon and 2 p.m., Sunday only.
Seasons of Life and Land is the first exhibit to take advantage of the museum’s new, larger Special Exhibits Gallery. Renovations began in March and will be complete in time for Saturday’s exhibit opening.
The gallery’s size was doubled, from 2,000 to 4,000 square feet, enabling the museum to bring in larger, more complex exhibits. Without the expansion, Barron said, it might not have been possible to show the Arctic exhibit in its entirety. “It would have been tight,” she said. “These are large-format images and we probably would have had to delete pieces. But now we’re able to show the entire 49 pieces as the artist would like it to best represent his work.”
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The artist, photographer Subhankar Banerjee, was born in Calcutta, India, in 1967 and earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering before coming to the U.S. Here, he added master’s degrees in computer science and physics. But, Banerjee said, he had a childhood passion for painting that lay dormant throughout those years. He said he was working as a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico when the somewhat sleeping avocation awakened.
“I was working as a scientist but art has been with me all my life, and I was contemplating leaving science behind and getting back to art.” This urge grew stronger when he did graduate study in New Mexico, Banerjee said, and fell in love with the wide open spaces of the American Southwest.
While photographing the Refuge, Banerjee lived with families of the native Gwich’in, Athabascan and Inupiat tribes, studying their customs and relationship to the land. During the two years, he traveled nearly 4,000 miles, on foot, by raft and kayak, snowmobile and bush planes and withstood temperatures that dropped to 40 below zero. Ever-aware of the work of renowned landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, Banerjee sought a style of his own — neither the “grand sculptural qualities of nature” that Adams pursued nor Porter’s “intimate landscapes.”
Banerjee, who currently lives in Seattle, said, “What I did was come up with something in between. I decided to photograph on cloudy days with no drama or romanticizing of the land. I wanted it to be subdued.” He said he worked to bring out the duality of both grand landscapes and simplicity, and a contemplative quality to the images.
The exhibit is timely, too, coming to the Burke as Congress continues to wrangle over the 2006 budget, which includes the possibility of allowing oil drilling in Alaska’s vast, undeveloped landscape. Calling the Refuge “truly a crown jewel of the Arctic,” Banerjee said it would be a shame to allow drilling to disturb the pristine area. “It is a short-term policy, and they are not looking at the long-term impacts,” he said.
Roxana Augusztiny, acting director of the Burke Museum, said the gallery expansion will enable the museum to do two things: “To look at a much wider range of traveling exhibits that are available, and also to put more of our own materials on display in a rotating series of exhibits.”
