Ilegvak
Ilegvak is a Yup’ik culture bearer, climate and Tribal sovereignty advocate, and a 2022 United States Artists Fellow from Alaska. His hand-sewn visual practice repurpose skin from self-harvested traditional foods.
Biography
Ilegvak is a Yup’ik culture bearer, artist, designer, filmmaker, writer, and educator from Akiak, Alaska, currently based in Sheet'ká (Sitka), Alaska. His hand-sewn works repurpose skin from self-harvested traditional foods, bridging worlds of Indigenous art, fashion, and subsistence. He has completed artist residencies at Santa Fe Art Institute and the Institute of American Indian Arts.
His art has been shown at museums and galleries across North America. His presentations at New York Fashion Week and Fashion Week Brooklyn in 2015 and 2016 led to profiles in The Guardian and The New York Times. Ilegvak produced the documentary Harvest: Quyurciq, which received a Native Peoples Action project grant.
From 2018-2020 Ilegvak became a Cultural Capital Fellow, a Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellow, and received an Individual Artist Award Project Grant from Rasmuson Foundation. In 2021 he received an NDN Collective Radical Imagination Grant and, in 2022, a Forge Project Fellowship and United States Artists Fellowship. His professional and personal work is increasingly focused on climate change and its disproportionate effects on Indigenous peoples. He was a visiting faculty member at Bennington for Spring 2023.