I’m standing at the Frye Art Museum, face-to-face with a black vinyl alien head that’s affixed to the wall like a giant sticker, its interior filled in with words as unfamiliar to me as distant galaxies. “Áa yaa sh nalxán,” reads the text. Overhead, an audio recording gives voice to the words, interspersed with cosmic synth twinkles. “Ax tuyadaa Áx xat tukwgadáa shakdéi.”
This work is Heaven and Earth, a collaboration between artist Alison Marks and her husband, Paul, a Tlingit language teacher and culture keeper whose father is one of the endangered language’s last fluent speakers. But this is only part of the work—the part that’s on earth. The other part lives in outer space where, thanks to a free star-naming website, Marks is naming stars after entries from the Tlingit dictionary. “Symbolically, I am sending the language into space so that it may survive there if we don’t save it on Earth,” she says.