Nome-born artist Jenny Irene Miller finds inspiration in Inupiaq roots
Like many kids of the ’90s, Jenny Irene Miller staged Polaroid photoshoots with her sibling. She dropped off film from other cameras at the grocery store and eagerly awaited the rolls to be developed. She dug through the family photo archives to learn about relatives, like her greatgrandfather who died before she was born. Through those early experiences, a passion was born.
“It’s just something very joyful, for me—making photographs, looking for the light,” Miller told the Nugget.
Growing up in Nome, Miller was surrounded by artists, even if they didn’t always formally carry that title. There were women who were experts at sewing parkas and kuspuks. There were ivory carvers who visited her classroom at Nome Elementary School. There were also examples of artists in her family who took on art as a career: Her late great-uncle was Ronald Senungetuk, a renowned sculptor, silversmith and wood carver from Wales who founded the University of Alaska Fairbanks Native Art Center.
Now Miller is finding her own career as an artist. She recently completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and has moved back to Alaska—to Anchorage, where her work is currently on exhibition at the Anchorage Museum, in the juried Alaska Biennial 2022.
The image chosen for the show, which is titled “Nora’s hair cut (lock 1 of 6),” documents a change that occurred in Miller’s household in 2021.
“My partner had her long hair cut short for the first time in her life,” Miller said. “I made this photograph of 1 lock of 6 in our backyard on a sunny day to record this moment at home.”
Miller’s eye for capturing personal, everyday moments is something she tries to share with students. Last week she visited St. Michael to teach a free photography workshop on behalf of the Inuit Circumpolar Council of Alaska. She led a similar
ICC workshop in St. Lawrence Island in September. Beyond imparting technical skills, Miller seeks to help students break down what makes a photo interesting and what an image can communicate.
“My students in St. Michael talked a lot about their work being a window for people outside of Alaska to look in and see what the village life is like for them,” Miller said. “But we also talked about how it could be a mirror, so it could be about the personal, kind of like what my work is about.”
In one recent project, titled “Where the tundra meets the ocean,” Miller mixes her own photographs and images from her family’s archives to focus on “Inupiaq and queer quotidian moments and memories.” Works from this series were recently displayed at the John Sommer Gallery in New Mexico. On the side of the frame for each print, Miller included designs that may not be immediately obvious to the viewer but hold an important meaning.
“These abstract designs are simple at first glance yet contain layers of information and are thousands of years old,” Miller explained during a recent lecture as part of the UAF Northwest Campus “Shine a Light” series. “Our Inupiaq ancestors adorned most everything they made, from clothing to hunting devices, with designs. These abstract designs silently communicate who and where someone comes from. Our designs can also mark important milestones in one’s life.”
Miller has a love for portraiture and especially making portraits of people she knows. In a project titled “Continuous,” created between 2015 and 2018, Miller produced portraits of individuals in the Indigenous lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and Two-Spirit (LGBTQ2+) community. Some of the subjects are her family members or people she has known since childhood, while others are new friends.
“During this time, I was also thinking a lot about my own story and youth and how I wish I would have had an Indigenous queer adult to reach out to and connect with as a person coming to know myself as queer,” Miller said. The series was intended to “inspire dialogue within our communities so that they can become more welcoming and safe for Indigenous queer kin to flourish.”
As Miller moves on from her MFA into freelancing, she hopes she will be able to continue to teach.
“I’ve never had an Indigenous photo instructor or Indigenous photo professor,” Miller said. “My goal is to eventually land a teaching position within a university so that I can hopefully be able to mentor more Indigenous photographers.”
Miller told the Nugget that budding artists seeking connection should reach out to artists whose work they like—some may not respond, but those who do could help build a community.
“The other advice I would give is, keep making the work, and make work that you want to make, and also know that you don’t have to travel anywhere just to make art,” Miller said. “You can make work about yourself, about your family, about the land—all of it has stories to tell.”