SONYA KELLIHER-COMBS

Spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, Sonya Kelliher-Combs works’ negotiate borders, those that divide geographical territories, delineate generations, and define the self. Informed by Alaskan Native culture and her surrounding landscape, Kelliher-Combs’ practice is deeply rooted in craft, combining customary and synthetic materials that range from walrus gut, porcupine quill, and hides, to glass beads, acrylic gel polymer, and nylon threads. Organized in series, Kelliher-Combs works share an immediacy and visceral quality that references skin, the highly mediated surface through which an individual begins to interact with others. A new work from her ongoing series Idiot Strings, first initiated as a way to honor relatives who had died by suicide, which affects Native peoples, especially Alaskan Natives, at an staggeringly high rate, suggests new ways to create memorials to injustice, and process collective grief. Topographies emerge in works consisting of hand-shaved animal hides, while a new sculpture references the physical barriers and architecture used to define territories. Seen together, her works not only chronicle the ongoing struggle for Indigenous self-determination, but more broadly, the ever-evolving relationships between humans and their lived environment.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs is an artist and curator who lives and works in Anchorage. Kelliher-Combs’ work is currently on view in An Indigenous Present, co-organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter at the ICA Boston through March 8. In 2025, her work was included in the exhibitions ALOHA NŌ, Hawai’i Triennial 2025, Shifting Landscapes, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Smoke In Our Hair: Native Memory and Unsettled Time, Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY. Additionally in 2025, Kelliher-Combs was the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman grant. Past awards and fellowships include United States Arts Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, Rasmuson Fellowship, Anchorage Mayor’s Arts Award and Alaska Governor’s Individual Artist Award. In 2024, Mark, the first major monograph of her work, was published by Hirmer Verlag in 2024, edited by Julie Decker, PhD. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Anchorage Museum, Alaska State Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Forge Project, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe, National Museum of the American Indian, University of Alaska Museum of the North, Fairbanks, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.