Susie Silook
Susie Silook is a Yupik/Inupiaq writer, carver, and sculptor. Born in 1960, in the remote village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, Susie grew up in a home where the first language was Siberian Yup’ik. Her father carved and her mother sewed skins. Her grandfather Paul Silook, whose Yupik name Siluk became her family’s surname, served as a scribe, translator and an assistant to teachers, preachers, and archeologists from the 1920s and beyond. Susie’s trip to the Smithsonian in the 1990s introduced her to boxes upon boxes of ethnographic material her grandfather donated during his work with Henry Collins and others. This collection provided Susie insight into her culture, rich in ivory artifacts that survived centuries and would become inspiration for her work.
A self-taught artist, Susie is one of the first successful woman ivory carvers, an artistic endeavor usually pursued by men. Unlike the historic or traditional Yupik carving compositions that center on animals and hunting, her pieces are sculpted portraits of women and sea goddesses, their expressions and postures indicative of her visions that align with her political and activist work on Native women’s issues. She uses her considerable talents to depict subjects that confront contemporary Alaska Natives, including issues of violence against Native women, of identity, spirituality, conflict and adaptation, as embodied by the female form.
Silook has become acquainted with many cultures through her life in Gambell, Adak and Anchorage, as well as her three-year service in the military. She brings that broad perspective to life in her art, her poetry and her prose. This external perspective, combined with the inspiration of her native traditions, makes for a very powerful and spiritual legacy of art.
In 2000, she was the recipient of the Alaska Governor’s Award for An Individual Artist. In 2001, she was awarded a fellowship by the Eiteljorg Museum and, in 2008, she received a United States Artists Rasmuson Fellow Award.
Silook’s work is included in many private and corporate collections. Museums holding her work in their permanent collections include: de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center; Museum of the North, University of Alaska, Fairbanks; and the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, Indiana. Her work was included in Art without Reservation: Changing Hands 2, a touring exhibit sponsored by the Museum of Arts & Design.
