The Juneau Community Foundation is pleased to announce this year’s Arts Vibrancy Endowment Artist Awards. The Artist Award grant program supports local artists and creators in their important work. To commemorate the Foundation’s 25th Anniversary this year, six applicants received a total of $25,000 in grants, with awards ranging from $2,500 to $5,000.
Susan Watson’s My Meeting Awareness series features large, close-up oil paintings of faces, and will open at the Juneau-Douglas City Museum in January. The paintings are portraits in one sense, but the main intention of the series is to use portraiture to dive deeply into what it means to meet someone directly, to connect with their awareness, reality, and being, through the medium of oil paint.
Flordelino Lagundino will perform alongside four other actors in the Obie Award-winning play, “The Romance of Magno Rubio ” by Lonnie Carter. Based on the short story by acclaimed Filipino American writer Carlos Bulosan about an illiterate Filipino farmworker in California’s Central Valley during the 1930s, the play will be a part of Theater Alaska’s 2026 summer season.
Spencer Edgers’ contemporary opera, Black Rock, U.S.A., is a 70-minute opera in three acts that centers on queerness, cultural identity, and labor rights within the context of a fictional mining town in the late 19th century. It will be written for an orchestra of approximately 30 musicians, 12 chorus members, and 5 primary cast members. The opera is being workshopped in Juneau in late 2026 with a condensed orchestra.
Lisa Fisher, Tlingit weaver, and Ryan Cortes and Kaila Buerger of Gemini Waltz Media will film a Ravenstail Weaving documentary that explores the revival of this nearly lost Northwest Coast art form through in-depth interviews with the women who helped bring it back into practice. By sharing their stories and highlighting how this knowledge is now being passed on to younger generations, the film seeks to honor the cultural resilience and intergenerational continuity of Ravenstail weaving.
Erin and Andrew Heist have been playing traditional American folk and bluegrass music in and around Juneau, Alaska, for nearly twenty years. Recently, they have shifted their focus to creating and performing original music. Now performing as The Heists, they are working on recording and releasing their first studio album of original songs together.
Annie Bartholomew is recording an album that blends traditional British Isles folk ballads with modern stories from Southeast Alaska’s fishing communities. Working with Gustavus-based producer Justin Smith and a group of women artists from across the state, this project will reinterpret historic maritime songs, incorporating the hopes, observations, and memories collected from Alaskan fisherwomen and women involved in the commercial fishing industry during its “golden age.”
This is the Foundation’s sixth year of providing these grants. By supporting these local artists and their projects, we’re not only enriching our cultural landscape but also investing in a more vibrant and inclusive community experience for all.
Thanks to generous local individuals and businesses, the Arts Vibrancy Endowment continues to grow, ensuring the Foundation can continue to address the changing needs and opportunities of artists, arts and culture projects, organizations, and programs in our town for years to come.
Photo courtesy of 2025 awardees, Lisa Fisher, Ryan Cortes, and Kaila Buerger.
