NZ artist braves Arctic cold to make murals in Alaska’s remote schools

Why I Made is a fortnightly feature in which artists and writers share the behind-the-scenes stories of their creations with listener.co.nz

Standing on the edge of the airfield at Kwethluk, Alaska, as the wind off the Bering Sea and Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta buffeted the temperature down to around -40°C, New Zealand artist Andrew Reid realised he shouldn’t have skimped on the gloves.

“I’d bought the $35 ones when I really should have got the $70 ones for us,” says Reid, from his barn home in North Waikato as he recalls the sensation of gloved fingers starting to freeze. “But it was a good lesson that up there, you really might find yourself in a position where you are on your own and have to rely on your own resourcefulness.”

Luckily for Reid, accompanied by his artist/film-maker son AJ and assistant Juan Rozas, even in the pitch dark and ice of a wintery Alaskan day, someone was at the airstrip, spotted them and had a vehicle that wasn’t too frozen to drive them into the village centre.

“We huddled together in the back of that truck cab likes bears.”

Reid and his team painted six largescale murals over five months at Ket’acik & Aapalluk Memorial School, likely to be one of the most remote places in which an NZ artist has worked. Born in Rotorua and raised in Borneo, Fiji, and on Auckland’s North Shore, Reid spent 40 years living in the US making huge public art works in police and fire stations, libraries and courthouses, subways, and on community and civic centre walls.

He returned to NZ about 18 months ago intending to work locally but was offered further opportunities in Alaska. He travelled back last month for a 14-day stint in Atmautluak to work alongside assistant Jacqueline Barrett to install murals that were fabricated in his Waikato studio.

Like Kwethluk, Atmautluak is a Yup’ik (indigenous) village in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, five aeroplane trips from Waikato. He’ll be back in Alaska, at a village called Eek, later this year but might try to reduce it to a three-plane trip.

Why do you make murals for schools in Alaska?