Asia Freeman
My multi-disciplinary work spans painting and production arts. My work as a curator is rooted in building artists’ power, elevating social justice, and strengthening social, cultural, and economic networks. This practice engages dozens of artists in exhibitions and residencies every year. The launching pad for this work has primarily been Bunnell Street Arts Center, a non-profit organization I co-founded in 1994, and the work also engages art centers and museums across Alaska and beyond. My practice centers the work of Alaska artists and their visions of adaptation, resistance, and healing. These curated projects help artists overcome geographic and social isolation, resist ongoing colonialism, and gain visibility in Alaska and beyond. I have curated two statewide touring exhibition tours: Our Way of Living (2024), Reflections of A Spill (2009); and two national touring exhibitions: Protection: Adaptation and Resistance (2022-4) and Decolonizing Alaska (2016-2019).
Painting is a quiet counterweight to my curatorial practice. In my paintings, four elements –earth, air, fire and water–and associated phenomena are metaphorical structures through which I explore perception, emergence and transformation. I am interested in how artists have imagined and represented the elements and forces of the material world historically, and how that intersects with contemporary colonial narratives, religious beliefs, and shifting boundaries between nature and artifice. Lately, I am particularly fascinated by idealized skies and heavenly backdrops, suggesting spiritual themes and dramatic, allegorical scenes. In my metaphorical paintings, the physical process of painting is central to my process. I work meditatively with deliberate marks, gravity, drips, bold movements, and long pauses. Elemental imagery takes familiar shapes, but I have always been more interested in mark-making, energy, discovery, and process than in replicating real spaces. Although some appear to be landscapes, I am asking what nature is and what the spirit is, and how ideas of each can work through painting.
Painting is a quiet counterweight to my curatorial practice. In my paintings, four elements –earth, air, fire and water–and associated phenomena are metaphorical structures through which I explore perception, emergence and transformation. I am interested in how artists have imagined and represented the elements and forces of the material world historically, and how that intersects with contemporary colonial narratives, religious beliefs, and shifting boundaries between nature and artifice. Lately, I am particularly fascinated by idealized skies and heavenly backdrops, suggesting spiritual themes and dramatic, allegorical scenes. In my metaphorical paintings, the physical process of painting is central to my process. I work meditatively with deliberate marks, gravity, drips, bold movements, and long pauses. Elemental imagery takes familiar shapes, but I have always been more interested in mark-making, energy, discovery, and process than in replicating real spaces. Although some appear to be landscapes, I am asking what nature is and what the spirit is, and how ideas of each can work through painting.