meet 2025 Fellowship artist

Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich

Cultural Affiliation: Koyukon Dené / Iñupiaq

Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich (Koyukon Dené / Iñupiaq) is a carver, interdisciplinary artist and scholar living, working, and subsisting in South-Central Alaska. Honoring her arctic and subarctic ancestral homelands, Ivalu’s work represents what has tied her and her ancestors to the North. Through carved, painted, and beaded sculpture and mask forms, photography, film, installation, poetics, and design, Ivalu creates representations of the revered wild relatives and homelands that have provided for her family and ancestors since time immemorial. Continuing the viewpoint of seeing these resources and places that are homelands as gifts given to the worthy who reciprocate respect and care for the land and wild relatives that share it. Connection to the realities of subsistence lifeways and arctic survival is vital to Ivalu’s work that mirrors what keeps us fed, warm and present in the circumpolar north. With ancestral ties to the communities of Nulato, Nome and Utqiagvik; Ivalu currently resides between the Denaʼina Homelands of Anchorage and Cohoe, Alaska.

Ivalu’s work has been exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach 22’, The Armory Show NY 22’, The Contemporary Native Art Biennial 22’, Nocturne Halifax 23’, The Anchorage Museum and others. Her work has been supported by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Inuit Futures, The Nia Tero Foundation, and others. Ivalu’s work is in collections at The RISD Museum, The Gochman family Collection, IAIA MoCNA, The Anchorage Museum and personal collections. Ivalu completed her MFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in May of 2024.