Partnership Spotlight: The Anchorage Museum
At Launch Alaska, collaboration is key to everything we do. Exhibit A: our partnership with the Anchorage Museum.
The state’s largest museum is a hub for creativity and community, and it provides the perfect venue for Launch Alaska programs and gatherings ranging from Tech Deployment Track to TrAKtion to team meetings — all vital parts of our work to accelerate the clean energy transition in Alaska.
Important parts of our collaboration unfold at the Seed Lab, a vibrant space adjacent to the museum in the heart of Downtown Anchorage. What makes this partnership such a natural fit? It’s all about community, climate change, and thinking about the future. Rebecca Pottebaum from the Anchorage Museum’s Seed Lab shares more.
Launch Alaska: Tell us about the Seed Lab – what does this place aim to accomplish, and how does climate change relate to it?
Rebecca Pottebaum: Seed Lab began as an initiative/partnership between the Anchorage Museum and Municipality of Anchorage for a public art challenge grant funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. We became one of five cities in the nation that year to receive a grant for thinking about art and how it intersects with climate change and community building.
Seed Lab was a building that was slated to become a parking lot. It sat empty for a number of years and previously held an insurance building and law office, and the thought was, “Hey, this can be a space for convenings and programs that instigate change-making and thinking about our community and how we interact with it.”
LA: How does that all fit into the museum’s goal “To be a museum for people, place, planet, and potential, in service of a sustainable and equitable North, with creativity and imagination for what is possible”?
RP: Originally, Seed Lab was our Bloomberg Public Art Challenge idea. After we fulfilled the obligations to the grant, the building and its programming have now become a long-term project of the Anchorage Museum. What that means is that we both have the flexibility to be a purveyor of public programing aligned with topics that we are thinking about like community building, resilience and climate change, and it also allows us to be responsive to the community and offer this space to organizations and groups that align with our mission or some of our initiatives.
Seed Lab really values hosting programming that is quality, challenging, informative and educational but really centered in place… Maybe that’s Anchorage, maybe that’s an exhibition specifically - or the North, generally.
LA: What role do community partners play in your work?
RP: We are so glad to have a very collaborative community in which we live and work. Community partners often help put together programs or find speakers… sometimes they have everything lined up but just need a space and audience and maybe that’s where we come in, but we also get exposed to their work and thus exposed to more work and ideas that are aligned with what we want to be doing. Community partners are essential to everything we do, and we seek to be a partner to the community in a very reciprocal way.
LA: Launch Alaska is so proud of our partnership with the Seed Lab and Anchorage Museum. Why is this kind of partnership important to the Museum, and what do you see as the major intersection between your mission and our work accelerating Alaska’s clean energy economy?
RP: We are thrilled to partner, and even just offer this space in partnership with Launch Alaska. We see their work as absolutely integral to what we are doing at Seed Lab. Everything we do boils down to future thinking… In all of our work, we’re thinking and working towards a future that we want to live in.
Launch Alaska is definitely an organization that has seized a potential, and they are actively working on realizing it for the good of Alaska and they are doing it through their vision of where we could be. Their work aligns with Seed Lab in that they are also envisioning a future that is better not only for their business, but our energy sector and our community.
Above: Launch Alaska staff meet in the Seed Lab. Photo by Jovell Rennie.