Linda Infante Lyons

Linda Anne Infante Lyons (born 1959) is a Native American visual media artist from Anchorage, Alaska. She is Alutiiq, with her mother's family descending from Kodiak Island, and Estonian. The island's natives experienced two waves of colonization, which plays a central role in Lyons' artwork.

Personal life and education Lyons attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where she received a BA in biology. She then studied at Viña del Mar Escuela de Bellas Artes in Chile from 1996 to 1998. Lyons remained in Chile for about eighteen years to focus on her painting and building a community before returning to Alaska, where she shares a studio in Mountain View with her husband Graham Dane.

Aside from working as an independent artist, Lyons also works with the Alaska State Council in the Arts and travels to schools to teach painting to the children.

Artwork Paintings Lyons has been described as a magical realist and a regionalist because of her technique and focus on Alaska. Lyons intends for her artwork to evoke emotions in the viewer, as well as create a sense of familiarity and curiosity about the unknown.

In an Artist Talk presentation given at the end of her residency with the Alaska State Museum, Lyons claimed that her art was influenced by "the abstract of sublime", which she states is conveyed through her juxtaposition of land formations such as volcanoes in the background of seemingly serene landscapes. Some prominent features of her work include unidentifiable locations with seemingly never-ending bodies of water, land and ice formations, and plants and animals.

Lyons has also painted a series of portraits, which were inspired by the theme of colonization in art. In the series, she painted portraits of indigenous women in traditional clothing holding animals with halos around their heads. Per the artist, this is meant to represent her spirituality and display Alutiiq and Russian heritage as having equal importance. By re-appropriating the Russian Orthodox iconography and incorporating the Alutiiq masks from the Pinart Collection in France, Lyons is "not dismissing" either culture suggesting that both cultures are equals. The women in her portraits are all based on family and friends and are usually holding an animal, as they are believed to be a link between the physical and spiritual world in many Native American cultures. In all of her portraits, the Alutiiq women are centered on the page and in a "power pose" that was once considered "sacrilegious" and only reserved for men.

Photography Lyons became interested in photography after taking reference photographs to help inspire her in her studio.

Public Art Linda Infante Lyons has created several pieces of public art in locations such as the Hispanic Cultural Center in Mountain View, where she painted a mural of rufous hummingbirds, intended to be symbolic of the diversity in Alaska. Lyons also painted a mural on the 100-foot wall at the Government Hill Commons and Community Orchard in Anchorage and a mural for the Healthy Alaska Natives Foundation as a part of The Water is Life project.

Themes The theme of Decolonizing Alaska has been dominant in her portrait work. Her ancestors from Kodiak Island were first colonized by Russia and then the United States. Their culture has taken a "devastating" hit as they were to assimilate into two distinct communities while encouraged to forget their own. Through this art movement, Linda Infante Lyons has been able to further explore her heritage and attempt to "restore [her] culture" after colonialism. Lyons went to Germany with the intent to learn how to translate her oil paintings into glass mosaics.

Linda Infante Lyons has had painting collections featured in Alaskan museums and galleries such as Open Space/ Open Mind and All Things Sacred at the Bunnell Street Art Center, Ebb and Flow at the Alaska State Museum, and Sites Unseen as a joint exhibition with her husband at the Alaska Humanities Forum. Alaska Contemporary Art Bank Alaska State Museum Alutiiq Museum and archeological Repository Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center

Painting Source: The plant that the seal is holding is pushiki, a local Kodiak plant. In this particular painting, the woman in the portrait is her great-grandmother. The child is holding a wooden, for lack of a better word, doll. This painting follows the same composition that her portraits in her All Things Sacred collection. This oil painting depicts Chiniak Bay that is in the Kodiak Island Borough. The landscape depicts an orange sky with gray clouds, a mountain range beyond the Kodiak body of water and has vegetation in the foreground of the canvas. It was one of two paintings created by the artist to be acquired by the museum in 2019. April Counceller, the museum's executive director, has noted that although the artworks are "non-traditional" when compared to the graphic art style of the Alutiiq, one is still able to look at Lyons' work and "know it's Alutiiq." This honorable mention captures a red construction vehicle covered in snow with the Alaskan mountains of the Bering Sea behind it. There is also a shed in the background of the heavily contrasted photograph. Overall, this image conveys the vast environment that is characteristic of Alaska with only one residence or business in sight.

Public Art Los Picaflores (2015) Lyons painted two picaflores, or hummingbirds, are surrounding a centralized red flower with hills and a body of water behind it. The rufous hummingbird depicted was chosen to symbolize diversity in Alaska because it migrates between Mexico and southern Alaska. The stenciled on design was inspired by the weeds that were on the previously abandoned lot. The mural was funded by the Atwood Foundation grant she received.