Juneau artist Daniel DeRoux has a favorite piece of public art that he tries to visit whenever he is in Fairbanks. It’s the Lend-Lease Memorial in Griffin Park, a pair of bronze statues depicting World War II-era pilots, one Russian and one American, who delivered airplanes to European fronts in the years before the United States officially entered the war. The bronze men stand on a pedestal bundled in vintage flight suits with their eyes to the horizon. One has an outstretched arm. He’s pointing as if he just caught a glimpse of aircraft approaching.

“It’s just magnificent. It’s monumental and just really well done,” DeRoux says.

DeRoux has placed a handful of public art pieces himself. Perhaps most conspicuous among them is his new mural commemorating Alaska statehood. It was installed last fall above the Seventh Avenue entrance to the Linny Pacillo parking garage, built together with the Dena’ina Civic and Convention Center. At 40 feet long and 20 high, it’s a colorful, head-turning, hand-painted piece that dominates the surrounding streetscape. The mural’s biggest feature is four portraits: William Egan, E.L. “Bob” Bartlett, Ernest Gruening and Robert Atwood—Alaska’s first state governor, first two U.S. Senators, and the Anchorage newspaperman who was tapped to head the Statehood Committee, a group of civic leaders who lobbied in Washington D.C. and did research in preparation for Alaska’s constitutional convention.

With those portraits mounted one story off the street, sidewalk critics have been heard calling the piece “Alaska’s Mount Rushmore.” DeRoux’s heard this, too.

“It’s the four big white guys,” DeRoux says.

But the piece isn’t just about four big white guys. In fact, the closer a viewer gets to it, the less you see the four big white guys and the more you see the dozens of other people also depicted in the mural.

“The best part for me, really, was researching how all of these people came together, and they came from all over Alaska to work together on this,” DeRoux says. DeRoux grew up in Juneau and remembers the statehood movement as a childhood event (he was eight years old)—one with pomp and parades, but one he witnessed as an observer, rather than participant.

The mural made him consider the historic event again. “It kind of tied the history together for myself, but I also get to give something that will last for other people to enjoy and to commemorate the event.”

DeRoux’s mural is a collage of 32 panels, each composed of 16 smaller pictures. Included in those 512 blocks are portraits of dozens of Alaskans involved in the history of the state. So Dorothy Awes, an Anchorage attorney and delegate to the constitutional convention, has her place on Gruening’s forehead. Katherine Hurley, the convention’s recording secretary, is at the end of the Gruening’s nose. Businessman and two-time Governer Wally Hickel is part of Bob Bartlett’s forehead.

The project took more than seven months to complete, after DeRoux’s proposal for the garage was accepted.  DeRoux spent more than five months designing the piece with a computer that he loaded photographs into. “Then it took about two months of real intense painting,” he says.

The computer would overlay and blend the smaller images into the larger whole of four portraits. The goal was to illustrate as many Alaska communities and regions as the collage would accept. A skier is repeated several times in the mural. So are a mountain goat and a person posing under arched jawbones from a bowhead whale. There are puffins and loons, a fox, and a Chilkat blanket pattern.

“There were some images that the computer just wouldn’t pick, so I had to fudge them around a bit, maybe change their skin tone slightly or give them a blue suit instead of a yellow one,” he says.

Church steeples appear in a couple cells. DeRoux saw dozens of pictures of onion-domed Russian Orthodox churches while poring over photos. “I went through a lot of images and the most ubiquitous thing, the most pervasive image we have, is the Russian church,” he says.

An installation to accompany the piece is planned for this spring, according to Jocelyn Young, Anchorage’s curator of public art.  Plaques are planned that will list the 73 communities and 49 people DeRoux represented in the mural, but the installation will not include a map of how to find each of them on the mural.

DeRoux says he thinks that might be too easy. It might encourage viewers to move along once they’ve spotted the image they’ve sought out. “They’ve asked for it, and I’ve come back with my arguments against it,” he says. “You’re going to have to scrutinize it longer and think about it more. If you just look at a chart, and then go to B-17 and find Aniak—then you’d just be off and down the street.”

scott@anchoragepress.com