What do you do when someone hands you $50,000 with no strings attached?

Two Alaska Native artists—one an emerging filmmaker living in New York, the other a master ivory carver and scrimshaw illustrator who lives on St. Lawrence Island in the middle of the Bering Sea—will have to ask themselves that question, having received cash awards from a new organization that has been doling out similar grants for the last three years.

Filmmaker Andrew Okpeaha MacLean and carver/illustrator Alvin Aningayou received fellowships from United States Artists, a nonprofit created in 2005, with $20 million in seed money from four major philanthropies: Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Prudential Foundation, and the Anchorage-based Rasmuson Foundation. Angayou, reached by phone from his home in Gambell on the far-flung island 200 miles southwest of Nome, told Flashlight he was “real hesitant” to apply when word came about the nomination. “I had never thought of applying for any fellowship or grant before,” he said.

He has no immediate plans for the cash. “It is something you’ve got to think pretty deep and hard over,” Angayou said. “It would give me an opportunity to try different things with my art.” The award comes at an interesting time for Angayou. “I was actually considering trying to find a nine-to-five, and trying that for a while,” he says, adding he wants to explore media besides ivory. “Ivory sometimes seems so limiting because of its size.”

St. Lawrence Island is home to about 1,300 people who live in the Yupik villages of Gambell and Savoonga. Angayou said he supports his family with a combination of art and subsistence hunting.

Angayou recalled the first drawing he ever committed to ivory. It was on a walrus tusk he had harvested himself at about 14-years of age. He didn’t want to spoil the ivory, so first he took it too his brother James, then in his mid-twenties. James had been selling scrimshaw art for cash so, Alvin figured, he should ask James to draw on the tusk. “He said to me, ‘You know how to draw. You should do it yourself’,” Alvin says. “He really encouraged me and I always remember that. I quickly learned that drawing on ivory and on paper are two different things, but I was so proud when I got done. I sold it for $100, I think, and back then that was a lot of money for me,”

MacLean is Inupiat and grew up in Barrow. He has family in Anchorage and currently lives in New York. He is working on a feature-length script, he said it expands on the mystery plot of his film Sikumi (On the Ice) which won a special jury award at Sundance Film Festival last January and was screened this month at the Anchorage International Film Festival.

This year MacLean has been selected to participate in the Sundance Institute screenwriter’s workshop, an invitation-only affair that’s a big deal in film circles.

Sikumi, presented in Inupiaq with English subtitles, deals with the isolation of its protagonist, a hunter who is the sole witness to a crime while traveling on the arctic pack ice.

It was shot on 35 mm film with lenses that give the image a 1:2.39 aspect ratio. For the uninitiated that’s an image more than twice as wide as it is tall. MacLean translates: “Sikumi is super wide,” he says, adding the arctic looks best presented that way.

“The landscape is so dramatic,” he says, “You just need the widest possible field of view to get a sense of the emptiness, and the freedom, that you feel when you are on the ice or the tundra.”

MacLean started in theater while growing up in Barrow, and went on to major in theater at the University of Washington.  He attended film school at New York University, where he earned a Masters of Fine Arts and began winning awards for his documentaries and short films. Sikumi is his fourth screen director’s credit. His short documentary Natchiliagniaqtuguk Aapagulu (Seal Hunting with Dad) earned media attention and awards in 2004.

MacLean and Angayou join 48 other USA fellows for 2008. The list includes artists from disciplines a varied as basket weaving and choreographer. Hip-hop playwright, Will Power, earned a USA fellowship this year. An anonymous panel nominates the artists. Their work is then scrutinized by a panel of artists and art experts within the discipline of the nominees.