Alaska builds new museum

FAIRBANKS, Alaska ­— The walls of the Museum of the North stand out against the interior Alaska sky like bold, white brush strokes on blue canvas.\nThe swooping exterior of the expanded University of Alaska museum, which hints of breaching whales or northern lights, lies in stark contrast to the low, big-box architecture typical of Alaska.\n"It's as far away from a box as you can possibly get," Aldona Jonaitis, director of the University of Alaska museum, says.\nDue to open in September, the museum's long-awaited second phase is as striking as the art and natural history exhibits inside of it. The addition will allow the display of 90 percent of the museum's art collection, provide lab space for everything from whale dissection to DNA testing of 100-year-old feathers and even provide office windows for every full-time staff member, a plus in the light-starved winter months.\nThe University of Alaska was founded in 1917, and the territorial legislature specified it was to include a museum. Archaeological and paleontological specimens collected by UA archaeologist Otto Geist became the foundation of the museum's collection, and they were at first modestly displayed in the office of college President Charles Bunnell.\nIt took until 1978 for the legislature to appropriate money for the first phase of a museum that was not in a hand-me-down building. With $6.4 million, $1.6 million less than requested, the museum in 1980 opened a 39,000-square-foot building, allowing museum staff and collections to be housed under one roof for the first time.\nBut since 1980, Jonaitis says, museum backers have ached for a promised expansion. "We need more space."\nFormer UA Fairbanks Chancellor Joan Wadlow hired Jonaitis in 1993 with the charge to enlarge the museum. Another reason to expand arose shortly after Jonaitis arrived: A pair of multinational tour companies decided they would rather take visitors to local mining parks than to the museum. Annual visitors dropped from 146,000 to 86,000, and the museum's income nose-dived.\nWhen the time came to expand, planners decided to try to duplicate the experience of the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which became a tourism destination on its own in an industrial city.\n"Other museums that have created what we call signature buildings have experienced the same 'Bilbao effect,' where the building becomes a destination," Jonaitis says. "I said, 'We really need to do this because we need to get tourists here in the summer to help us pay our bills.'"\nNatural beauty helps. The museum sits on a long ridge that overlooks the vast Tanana River Valley, wide flatlands that spread south like a carpet to the base of the Alaska Range. The museum's exterior walls are made of pearlescent white aluminum composite. When the sun is low, they turn rosy like alpenglow.\n"We want to show that Alaska art is not just the Sydney Laurence paintings, although that's a very important part of Alaska art," Jonaitis says. "We want to say that Native art and non-Native art are of equal value. Art that's been called art and things that have been called craft, like quilts, are of equal value. We want to open people's minds to the broadness of what art is all about."\nJonaitis, after years of fund raising and planning, says the building is inspirational and unlike anything in the state.\n"I'm from New York City, and when I told people I was going to Fairbanks, Ala., to be a museum director, they thought I was nuts," she says. "One of my best friends said, 'You're going to be away so far from anything cultural, Aldona.' I would like this building, among other things, to communicate that Alaska in general, Fairbanks in particular, are very significant cultural capitals"