Austin Merrill Mecklem 
American, 1894-1951

Indian Town, Ketchikan, Alaska, 1937
Gouache on gesso paperboard

WPA Collection, 1942

 

Visual Description

This painting depicts a small Alaskan town along a river. Mecklem uses a muted color palette of faded white, gray, and brown to depict the scene, with pops of brick red and golden yellow used for some of the buildings and roofs. There are a wide variety of buildings in the landscape, such as shops, homes, a church in the distance, and a lumber mill along the river, busy at work with plumes of smoke drifting into the sky. Small figures dot the sidewalks along the main thoroughfare of the town and there is a lone boat on the river. The background depicts a hazy mountainscape along an overcast sky.

 

Extended Label Text

Known as “Alaska’s first city,” Ketchikan is located along the state’s southeastern coast near British Columbia, Canada. In 1937, the WPA inaugurated the Alaska Art Project, which sought to publicize the territory and its industrial growth in a special art exhibition. Indian Town, Ketchikan, Alaska was produced during the approximately six-month period in which Austin Merrill Mecklem and the twelve other artists travelled across Alaska, sketching and painting. The planned exhibition never happened, and tragically, most of the Alaska Art Project’s original work was destroyed in a hotel fire in 1972.