System Status by Owen Tucker and Anthropogenic Traces by Wendy Croskrey
On View: August 7 – August 29, 2026 First Friday
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7, 5–7 pm (Gallery opens at noon on First Fridays.)
The Bear Gallery is located on the third floor of the Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts in Pioneer Park, 2300 Airport Way, Fairbanks, Alaska.
Admission to the Bear Gallery is free of charge and open to the public Monday–Saturday, noon–6 pm.
August in the Bear Gallery brings together two concurrent solo exhibitions by Alaska artists Owen Tucker and Wendy Croskrey — two distinct explorations of material transformation and the traces human presence leaves behind.
In System Status, Owen Tucker works across collage, mosaic, and sculpture, splicing and grafting found materials into new compositions. A few years ago, after a lifetime of drawing and other mark-making, Tucker traded his pencil for a sharp blade — a shift that opened into a practice of breaking materials down into color, texture, and fragments of meaning, then rebuilding them into something new. Everything is a potential material, from old books to building supplies to the common dandelion, and Tucker’s collage practice has naturally extended into mosaics and quilting. He sees his creative process as closely tied to contemplative practice — more meditation than engineering, built from countless small, repeated acts of attention.
In Anthropogenic Traces, Wendy Croskrey draws on objects recovered from remote landscapes and materials displaced, discarded, or exposed through human intervention. Collected from sites marked by extraction and disturbance, these remnants are recontextualized and transformed, shifting from their original function into vessels of reflection. Some pieces retain visual connections to the environments from which they were gathered, while others evolve into constructed narratives that speak more broadly to impact, memory, and change — tracing a dialogue between place and intervention, and revealing how even the most isolated terrains can carry evidence of human touch.
The First Friday opening reception takes place Friday, August 7, 5–7 pm.
About the Artists
Owen Tucker
Owen Tucker is an artist working in various mediums, including collage, mosaics, and sculpture. His work has appeared in various galleries in Alaska and beyond, including the Anchorage Museum’s 2025 Alaska Triennial. He has also received an Environmental Artistic Activism Grant from the Puffin Foundation and was an Alaska State Parks Artist-In-Residence at the Hunt Memorial Cabin in the Chena River State Recreation Area. He lives in Anchorage, Alaska.
Wendy Croskey
Wendy Ernst Croskrey is a multi-media sculptor and Professor of Art at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she has taught since 1990. She received her BFA from the University of Minnesota and her MFA from The Ohio State University in 1990. Croskrey has held solo and two-person exhibitions at the University of Tasmania (Australia), the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, and Ohio State University Gallery, and her work has been included in invitational and juried exhibitions in Italy, Australia, China, Hawaii, and across the United States. Her practice spans metal fabrication, casting, 3-D printing, molding, drawing, glass casting, and metalsmithing.
About Fairbanks Arts Association
Since 1966, Fairbanks Arts has worked to connect, support, and showcase the artists and audiences who make creativity a defining part of life in Alaska’s Interior.
As a nonprofit organization and Interior Alaska’s local arts agency, Fairbanks Arts serves as a hub for the region’s cultural activity — coordinating exhibitions, workshops, arts education programs, and community initiatives across visual and literary arts. From the Bear Gallery in Pioneer Park to community events and educational outreach, Fairbanks Arts exists to make the arts accessible to everyone and to strengthen the creative ecosystem that sustains local culture, health, and connection.
Learn more about opportunities to get involved with Fairbanks Arts by clicking here, sign up for our Fairbanks Arts News e-newsletters, and follow @fairbanksarts on Instagram and Facebook.
Celebrating 60 years of arts and community, Fairbanks Arts Association has served as a creative home for artists, audiences, and cultural experiences since 1966. We are proud to continue supporting the arts and fostering connection through creativity across Interior Alaska. As we celebrate this milestone year, we invite community members to join us in sustaining the arts for future generations. Learn how you can get involved with Fairbanks Arts today by volunteering, becoming a new or renewing member, or making a charitable gift. Fairbanks Arts is your local arts council, and its work is not possible without you!
Fairbanks Arts Association programs are made possible in part by support from the Fairbanks North Star Borough, National Endowment for the Arts, Alaska State Council on the Arts, Lotto Alaska, the Richard L. and Diane M. Block Foundation, Mt. McKinley Bank, the City of Fairbanks Hotel/Motel Discretionary Fund, and individual and corporate contributions from supporters like you.
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