Image courtesy of the Alaska Arts Confluence.

The Haines-based Alaska Arts Confluence signed a fifteen year lease on the sculpture garden property at Fort Seward this month. Now volunteers are breathing new life into the project.

Carol Tuynman is the Director of the Alaska Arts Confluence. She has a small smile on her face as she turns the crank on one of the interactive pieces of art in the sculpture garden. She says the garden is reflective of locals’ knack for reusing and repurposing materials.

“I just love it,” she said.

“I love possibilities. And I love working with people who are interested in creation and doing things publicly that you know, everybody can enjoy.”

It’s been here for five yearsin the ruins of an historic barracks building that burned down in 1981. The garden was overgrown and the ruins were crumbling perilously just a few weeks ago.  But after hundreds of hours of volunteer work, art pieces emerge gracefully from the bones of the building in the style of an open-air museum.

“It’s hard to imagine, but in the five years since we started this, we’ve actually taken out probably 10 tons of debris,” Tuynman said.

The vision went before the infrastructure.The sculpture garden was a grassroots effort initiated by members of the Arts Confluence. But the garden didn’t have a formal lease for the Port Chilkoot Company land where the art was installed. They were operating “on a handshake.”

As of this month, they have a fifteen year lease from the Port Chilkoot Company. Lee Heinmiller is the President. His father and four other veterans bought the Fort surplus property at the end of World War II.

“The company still owns some of the real estate in the fort,” he said.

“The hospital building, the barracks building, and the quartermasters building.”

Port Chilkoot Company attempted a restoration of the two barracks buildings in the 1970s. But  that came to a halt when a faulty boiler burnt one of the buildings down. Now, it’s too expensive for the company to take on another restoration. But Heinmiller says he’s happy to have the burned site cleaned up even more.

“The Port Chilkoot Company still owns some of the real estate in the fort. The hospital building, the barracks building, and the quartermaster’s building,” Heinmiller said.

Port Chilkoot Company is waiving the first two years of rent and the Alaska Arts Confluence is paying the insurance. After two years, Tuynman says the non-profit will pay about a quarter of the property taxes using grants, funding contributions, and volunteer services.

“Today, I’m weeding and sweeping away debris,” said Ellen Larsen. She is among the volunteers who are sprucing up the garden under the direction of local landscape designer Jason Schulz. According to Larsen, he is using his decades of experience to give the project shape.

“He’s not cleaning up the floor and getting rid of everything. He’s using the artifacts and the rock, but using it in a way that makes sense. It just makes a real visual visual picture of the fort and the barracks and then looking across there

She gestures to the remaining barracks building, right next door. It  has the same design as the one that burned down. It’s a powerful reminder of what was once in this space. The uncovered and displayed artifacts in the garden give a strangely intimate look at what was here before.

Tuynman says her vision is to see the whole fort revitalized. As she shows me around the garden, I get the sense that she’s seeing past what’s there, into a hopeful future. Another vision, maybe, the kind that makes projects like the sculpture garden into reality.

First Friday goers will be able to see the garden in its new glory as they shop an evening Farmer’s Market at the Fort from 4-7 p.m on August 2, 2019.