The Rasmuson Foundation recently honored former Talkeetna resident CJ Harrell with a 2025 Individual Artist Project Award. One of 50 recipients named in the grant cycle, Harrell intends to use the $10,000 grant to produce a series of large scale block prints documenting their family’s often challenging rural Alaskan upbringing.
In an interview, CJ describes the process of block printing.
Block printing, or how I do it, is I usually work with linoleum it’s called relief block printing, which means that I apply my design to the linoleum and then I
carve away the linoleum using specialized tools. Then I apply a layer of ink, and whatever I didn’t carve away the ink is going to be rolled and applied to.
Then I will I take a sheet of paper and press it on there really
well…. And then I peel back that paper….It’s like a stamp.
Harrell spent most of childhood between Caswell and Talkeetna, graduating from Su Valley High School in 2017 before moving to Juneau to attend the University of Alaska Southeast. The 27-year-old working artist and framing apprentice now calls Juneau home, but intends to use the Rasmuson grant to return to South Central Alaska this spring to re-visit the over 12 different homes CJ lived in as a young person. These varied spaces include a defunct Denali Park bus, an international mountaineering hostel, multiple dry cabins, as well as more traditional houses. Through this exploration, CJ aims to tell the story of a childhood characterized by both poverty and abundance.
I think that for me, something that this project really tackles is diving into personal challenges and hardships and experiences growing up in those spaces and how a lot of them are actually systemic…issues and challenges, or they’re communal, or they kind of maybe show either a shared experience or a larger issue. And I think that a lot of the challenges that I faced growing up do have that connection there.
I had a parent who experienced substance abuse, and they are now sober, and I have a really good relationship with them. They’re very supportive of this project, too. But I certainly know that I’m not the only person in Alaska who has a parent, if not loved one, who experienced or has gone through substance abuse…. I think that there is that juxtaposition of having had that experience and having had that hardship and the grief that comes with that.
And then at the same time, having had this, these really wonderful, almost idyllic experiences of growing up so close to nature and so affected by nature all the time, kind of whether we liked it or not, too. And so in that way I have memories of being pretty cold growing up huddled around the wood stove, and a part of that was because we were just that close to our surroundings. So, but it’s tricky, and it’s a big topic, and I really want to handle it respectfully for myself and for the people in my life, but also for other people in Alaska who have faced similar challenges.
Harrell is finalizing the details to premier the block prints and related pieces at a solo show at a downtown Juneau gallery in December 2026. Thereafter, Harrell has hopes of someday bringing the art show to Denali Arts Council’s Sheldon Community Arts Hangar.
The Rasmuson Foundation’s Individual Artist Award program began in 2004, with over 600 Alaskan artists receiving project or fellowship grants to date. Other local Northern Valley artists to receive Rasmuson project grants since the program’s inception include blacksmith Kevin Foster who received funding in 2007; visual artist Leighan Falley in 2013, author Sarah Durr in 2015, and musician and visual artist Steve Durr in 2022.
