Chatter Marks

Anchorage Museum
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Chatter Marks is a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska’s identity through the creative and critical thinking of ideas—past, present and future. Featuring interviews with artists, presenters, staff and others associated with the Anchorage Museum and its mission.

  1. 2D AGO

    EP 130 Cold War cakes with Julia O’Malley

    Julia O’Malley is a journalist, a cook, a baker, and lately she’s been researching and re-creating Cold War cakes. During the Cold War era—roughly the decades between the end of World War II and the early 1990s—cake mix transformed a food once associated with luxury into something democratic, something anyone could make at home. Julia says that those boxed mixes, and the recipes people built around them in the ‘70s and ‘80s, are more than just dessert. They’re cultural artifacts that reveal how women navigated creativity, expectation, and changing ideas about domestic life. They reflect a moment when women were entering the national conversation from within domestic space. Experimenting, adapting, and reshaping expectations. That shift raised a question inside the kitchen itself: What happens when packaged ingredients, appliances, and new food technologies promise women time—time to work, to control their finances, and to claim a larger role in public life? In Alaska, where fresh ingredients were often scarce and communities had long relied on shelf-stable foods, brought in through supply chains and institutional systems, cake mixes made a lot of sense. For generations, Alaskans have adapted to what’s available—working with canned goods, powdered ingredients, and foods designed to travel long distances before reaching the table. A box of cake mix fit easily into that reality. Julia has been tracing these stories through old cookbooks and community recipes, even digging into ones from boomtown Fairbanks in 1909, to understand how something as ordinary as cake can tell us about women’s lives, shifting ideas of feminism, and the creativity that unfolded in Cold War kitchens. Because food, Julia says, is always a story. It’s one of history, origin, climate, and longing. And in the Cold War kitchen, when the threat of nuclear annihilation hovered in the background of daily life, even something as simple as baking a cake could feel like a small act of reassurance.

    1h 22m

  2. FEB 28

    EP 129 Branding the Arctic with Jeremie McGowan and Amund Sjolie Sveen

    Jeremie McGowan is an artist, designer, and researcher. Amund Sjolie Sveen is an artist. And together, they created Real. Arctic., an exhibition that examines how the word “Arctic” is used in branding, institutions, geopolitics, and everyday consumer products — and how the use of that word shapes what we think we know about the arctic. Their work blurs the line between critique and commodity, asking who gets to define the Arctic, who profits from it, and what gets flattened in the process. Throughout the exhibition, the work shifts form — from displays of “Pure Arctic” deodorant to an expanding archive of Arctic-branded objects — asking viewers to reconsider what is real and what has been manufactured. It explores how art and design can both construct and unravel powerful narratives about place, and what responsibility comes with working inside those systems. Jeremie and Amund collect and document products from around the world that call themselves “Arctic,” or borrow the image, the light, or the myth of the Arctic to sell something. Even when those products have no connection to the place itself. Deodorants that promise Arctic purity, chewing gum that offers polar freshness, outdoor brands that are marketed around rugged endurance and masculine extremes. Again and again, the Arctic appears as clean, untouched, and invigorating — a blank canvas for refreshment or conquest. As Jeremie points out, much of that marketing is driven by an outsider fantasy: the idea that you’re the first, the only one to witness the wilderness or the Northern Lights, even as that experience is packaged and sold en masse. Amund says that the Arctic’s power as a word may lie in its perceived remoteness. Because it feels unknown, it can be filled with whatever we want it to mean. And in that process, the realities of the place itself and the people who live there often fall away and what remains is a brand. And then, beneath all of that, is a deeper question about power: who gets to define a place, and whose version of that place becomes the story that guides our understanding of it.

    1h 15m

  3. FEB 16

    EP 128 The Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest with Paul Koberstein

    Paul Koberstein is a journalist, whose recent book, “Canopy of Titans,” explores one of the most overlooked ecosystems on Earth: the Pacific Coastal Temperate Rainforest. Stretching roughly 2,500 miles from just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to the western Gulf of Alaska, it’s the largest temperate rainforest on the planet. Fueled by Pacific storms and cool ocean currents, it supports towering redwoods, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and cedar — some of the largest and oldest trees in existence. Acre for acre, these forests store more carbon than tropical rainforests like the Amazon, with vast reserves locked in massive trunks, deep soils, roots, and centuries of accumulated woody debris. But even though it’s one of the most carbon-dense ecosystems we have, and a critical buffer against climate change, it remains largely overlooked in global climate conversations. Paul pushes back on some of the most common narratives about forests and climate. He points to those industry ads that promise for every tree cut down, three more will be planted. It’s an argument that sounds reassuring until you realize a young sapling can take a century to store the amount of carbon held in the massive tree that was felled. Trees are about 50 percent carbon. Through photosynthesis they pull carbon dioxide out of the air, lock that carbon into their trunks and roots, and release the oxygen we breathe. Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest alone holds more total carbon than any national forest in the country. That scale of storage is central to Paul’s point: the science doesn’t say we’re powerless. It suggests that we can still influence the climate back toward something more stable. If fossil fuels loaded the atmosphere with excess carbon, then forests, if protected and restored, can help draw it back down. Forests have stabilized the climate for thousands and thousands of years. Whether they continue to do so depends largely on us letting them do their job.

    1h 10m

  4. FEB 1

    EP 127 Shaped by land with Emily Sullivan

    Emily Sullivan is a writer, a photographer, and a director whose work is grounded in questions of land, community, and responsibility. Throughout her work, she focuses on uplifting Indigenous perspectives — not by speaking for communities, but by listening to what people are already saying and doing. Her first film, Shaped by Land, is currently screening at festivals. It’s a documentary about Greenlandic skiers and their connection to place, set against the backdrop of the new Greenland Tourism Act — legislation designed to protect land, center local ownership, and resist extractive tourism. Emily’s interest in Greenland is shaped by her experience in Alaska, where many of the same tensions play out under different economic structures. In both places, people arrive seeking experience, adventure, and meaning, often without reckoning with what those desires take from the communities they move through. Emily’s path to this work started when she was just a kid. She’s always been an observant person, someone who noticed small shifts in light and weather — that’s where her photographic eye comes from — and that sense of awe never really left. It grew out of curiosity, and later, into a belief that anything capable of stopping you in your tracks is probably worth paying attention to. And then, through her work and time spent in Alaska, climate change became personal and immediate — visible in rivers that don’t freeze when they should, unstable ice, unfamiliar weather patterns, and disrupted fish runs.  Much of her education in climate change came from Alaska Native peoples, specifically women who have been leading this work for generations. That learning shaped Emily’s commitment to bringing Indigenous knowledge, solutions, and sovereignty to the forefront of her storytelling — using careful observation and conversation to explore the forces shaping our collective future.

    1h 18m

  5. JAN 26

    EP 126 Cooking Alaska with Kevin Lane

    Kevin Lane is the executive chef and co-owner of The Cookery and The Lone Chicharron Taqueria in Seward, and he was recently named as a James Beard Award semifinalist. Reflecting on that recognition, he says it wouldn’t have been possible without his team at The Cookery, or the kitchens and crews from his past that shaped the way he cooks today. Those roots stretch back to California’s Sacramento area, where he was raised on crockpot meals, black-eyed peas, and lentil stew, before he found his way into kitchens in San Diego. Around nineteen, he was eating street tacos, shucking oysters, and learning the pace of restaurant life — first on the cold oyster bar, then on the hotline, where teamwork and discipline took root. Those early experiences still show up in his food today — the steady presence of Mexican influence, the belief that cooking is ultimately about making people happy, and he’s still shucking oysters.  He was still early in his career when he moved to Juneau to work as a sous-chef. There, and later in Sitka, he recognized the realities of Alaska’s food system, how kitchens relied heavily on frozen and canned goods because they were dependable. Orders had to be placed seven to ten days out, and even then, fresh vegetables and herbs might arrive frozen and mushy. It was a lot different from working in California, where you could order produce in the morning and expect it that afternoon. The learning curve was steep, but learning to adapt is what good cooks do. So, given Alaska’s abundance of fresh seafood, he adjusted his cooking and learned to let fish become the focus. And now that there’s more access to farm-fresh produce than ever before, the constraints that once defined cooking in Alaska have eased, expanding what’s possible on a menu.

    1h 29m

  6. 12/30/2025

    EP 125 Art and illness with Peter Dunlap‑Shohl

    Peter Dunlap‑Shohl's career traces a remarkable arc, from daily newsroom deadlines to personal, long-form storytelling. For 27 years, he worked for the Anchorage Daily News, drawing editorial and political cartoons. He produced thousands of comics focused on, more often than not, the worst things he could find in Alaska politics and in the pages of the newspaper — the biggest screwup, the clearest malfeasance, the loudest troublemaker — and then he’d satirize it by cartooning it. This is how a newspaper cartoonist does their job. But he also worked on the comic strip Muskeg Heights. The strip was about a fictional Anchorage neighborhood, and it allowed him to step out of the editorial page — away from politics — to explore the emotional aspects of living in Alaska. He worked on that for about a decade, until Parkinson’s made it too difficult to keep up with the weekly pace of the work.  In more recent years, he’s authored two graphic memoirs: My Degeneration, about his Parkinson’s diagnosis in 2002, and Nuking Alaska, about the nuclear dangers Alaska faced during the Cold War. Both books were something Peter never thought he’d be capable of creating after being diagnosed. But he says that with the help of medication and brain surgery, he’s been able to curb the effects of the disease and accomplish some of the most rewarding and successful work of his life. But he’s careful not to frame the disease as a gift because it’s not. In My Degeneration, he writes that "it’ll take everything from you, everything it has taken you a lifetime to acquire and learn." What is a gift, though, is his reaction to it — the power of medicine, human ingenuity, and perseverance are incredible things. Overall, it’s taught him that he’s not in control, and that on his best days he’s sharing the wheel with Parkinson’s.

    1h 13m

  7. 12/17/2025

    EP 124 The sound of remote places with Charles Stankievech

    Charles Stankievech is an artist, a writer, and an academic. He teaches at the University of Toronto, and his art takes him into some of the most remote landscapes on earth. Places like CFS Alert, the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world. He describes the Arctic as occupying two parallel spaces in our cultural imagination: one built on myth and fantasy, and another grounded in harsh, physical reality. He says that most people will never set foot there, which means our understanding of it comes from ideas rooted in medieval tales of magnetic mountains, science-fiction fortresses carved out of ice, or the general sense that it’s a blank, unreachable expanse. But beneath that fantasy is a real landscape shaped by nature and human activity.  One of Charles’ early Arctic projects was about the Distant Early Warning Line, a network of Cold War radar stations built across the Arctic to detect incoming Soviet bombers. He began thinking about how the remnants of that global conflict were already entangled with what he called an emerging “Warm War,” where rising temperatures and melting sea ice would turn buffer zones into contested shipping routes and resource frontiers.  Sound is one of his primary tools for understanding these places. He says that what you hear often tells a different story than what you see, and so his work uses sound to help people experience aspects of a place that visuals alone can’t capture. That instinct connects back to his own life — long days spent alone in the Rockies with his dog, camping, hiking, and snowboarding in the backcountry. Those solitary experiences were a refuge, a place where existential questions emerged naturally. It’s where he learned that when you confront the world on your own terms, you gain a clearer understanding of yourself and the people around you.

    1h 38m

  8. 11/24/2025

    EP 123 The Athlete's Mindset with Kikkan Randall

    Kikkan Randall is a five-time Olympian and an icon of U.S. cross-country skiing. But before all the medals and podiums, she was a high schooler with dyed hair, face paint, and a nickname that captured her energy: “Kikkanimal.” Her teammates gave it to her as a nod to the edge, spirit, and unity she brought to the team. Cross-country skiers understand that it’s a sport that rewards time spent—refining muscle memory, living in a zone of discomfort, and building toward the kind of performance that only shows up after years of hard work. Raised in a family that loved the outdoors, Kikkan found herself drawn to this community of grounded, like-minded people. And as her competitive fire grew, so did her sense of camaraderie—training alongside rivals, and becoming genuine friends with competitors from places like Finland. When Kikkan crossed the finish line to Olympic gold, it was a breakthrough for American skiing. What once seemed out of reach had become reality. But her team had done more than stand on a podium, they’d changed the culture. They trained together, got to know each other outside of training, and showed up to races in face paint, neon and novelty socks. And in that show of teamwork and connection, they built something so strong that other national teams started to emulate.  That same spirit followed Kikkan beyond sport. After retiring at the top of her game, she faced a breast cancer diagnosis, and her athlete mindset took control. She broke the treatment into pieces, taking it on one small battle at a time. It kept her focused on the day-to-day work rather than the big picture. It’s the same mindset that carried her through five Olympics—one that relies on optimism and patience. Today, she’s back where it all started, leading the Nordic Skiing Association of Anchorage and shaping the future of the sport she helped redefine.

    1h 25m
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About

Chatter Marks is a podcast of the Anchorage Museum, dedicated to exploring Alaska’s identity through the creative and critical thinking of ideas—past, present and future. Featuring interviews with artists, presenters, staff and others associated with the Anchorage Museum and its mission.

Information

  • Creator
    Anchorage Museum
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    130
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2020 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Chatter Marks

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