Artists

Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq and Athabascan) is a mixed-media artist whose family hails from the Alaska North Slope community of Utqiaġvik and the interior village of Nulato. Born in 1969 in Bethel, Alaska, and raised in Nome, she grew up practicing traditional women's and collective labor — skin sewing, beading, and food preparation — that instilled in her an appreciation for intergenerational knowledge and material history. She studied at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where an instructor's blunt assessment of the odds of sustaining a career as an artist helped crystallize her resolve to pursue art in service of her Native traditions; she earned her BFA there in 1992 before going on to complete an MFA at Arizona State University.

Working across drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, Kelliher-Combs combines customary materials — walrus gut, hide, porcupine quill — with synthetic ones like acrylic polymer, glass beads, and nylon thread, imbuing her work with a visceral quality that evokes skin as the mediated surface through which people interact with one another and the world. Her recurring motifs, including pouch-like forms she calls "secrets" and sinuous lines suggesting topography, chronicle both the ongoing struggle for Indigenous self-determination and the shifting relationship between people and the Arctic landscape they inhabit.

Kelliher-Combs is the recipient of the United States Artists Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, the Rasmuson Foundation Fellowship, the Anonymous Was A Woman grant, the 2005 Anchorage Mayor's Award for the Arts, and the 2010 Alaska Governor's Individual Artist Award. In 2024, Hirmer Verlag published Mark, the first major monograph of her work, edited by Julie Decker. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Frist Art Museum, the Hudson River Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art's Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, among many others; in February 2027, the Whitney Museum of American Art will present Sonya Kelliher-Combs: TITIQ/MARK, her first institutional solo exhibition in New York. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the British Museum, the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Anchorage Museum, and the University of Alaska Museum of the North, among others.

Kelliher-Combs is an artist and curator who lives and works in Anchorage, Alaska, where she serves on the boards of the Alaska Native Arts Foundation, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and the Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Arts.