This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Earlier this year, Robin DeAlva made a Facebook group that she says addresses a specific issue in Juneau — the challenge of finding and offloading arts and craft supplies in the wake of Juneau’s Joann store closing last year. The group is called Juneau Art Supply and Exchange, and has nearly 300 members.
The idea to start the group came from her search for a very specific crafting item: beeswax.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Robin DeAlva: My name is Robin DeAlva, and I created this group as the, I guess, admin. I’m not an avid social media person, per se. So I’m new at this, and the group’s grown pretty fast.
So my art supplies, I shipped all of it here from Seattle. I had a career as an artist in Seattle, but they were in storage for over a decade, and it was just a year and a half ago that I unearthed everything and found a studio space.
Currently, you know, I just am trying to unravel what kind of artist I was then and who I am now, and, you know, everything that’s changed along the way. And looking at all of this art supply that I have was kind of overwhelming.
So I do encaustic art, and I have a lot in the past. Encaustic, it’s … you use beeswax in a molten form, and you tint it with pigments, and you paint with it while it’s hot. It’s actually an ancient form of painting, dating back to the Egyptians, where they would paint portraits on the outside the sarcophaguses.
It’s a unique medium, that’s for sure. There’s something about it. The smell of the beeswax, the mixing of the colors, is something that I love to do, and then the layering. So there’s, you know, a lot of translucency, but you build layers and dimension, and it can even carve into it. It just has a world of possibilities. So that’s what attracts me to it.
What triggered this idea was, I’m running out of beeswax, and I thought, “I know there’s got to be some other encaustic artists in this town.”
So I reached out on the existing artist groups in town, local artist groups on Facebook, and nobody responded. It’s been, you know, like, a few years, and nobody’s responded to my call out. So especially with, you know, the closures of some of our local art supply stores. I thought, well, “Let me try this out. Let me reach out and see if I can find anybody that way.” So that’s actually what triggered the whole creation of the group initially.
It was really so moving in the beginning. And on the note of other buy, sell, trade groups, I posted or shared the group there, and over two days, you know, we got like, almost 300 members. So it’s super exciting.
And also, I hear all the comments, you know, people joining, and people are really excited, and to see all the variety, the wide array of what people are doing in town is amazing.
There’s a lot of metalsmithing going on — anything from jewelry making to armor — you know, that sort of thing. And a lot of costume makers, and then also teachers or people that work with, you know, the elderly and senior groups doing crafting. And, you know, parents just looking for crafts for their kids.
And this is just what ifs, or, you know, later down the line, if this became a possibility, would be cool to do, maybe, larger community group gatherings, like swaps, or working with other groups, like the Makerspace.
Maybe even doing some creative events. But obviously that’s just like an idea for the future possibility.
