{"id":47353,"date":"2019-05-02T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/project-turns-statistics-into-portraits\/"},"modified":"2019-05-03T14:14:49","modified_gmt":"2019-05-03T22:14:49","slug":"project-turns-statistics-into-portraits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/project-turns-statistics-into-portraits\/","title":{"rendered":"Missing, murdered women: Artist tries to make crisis feel real"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\t\t\t

Correction: An earlier version of this article spelled Rep. Tiffany Zulkosky’s name as Zulkoski. The correct spelling is Zulkosky. The article has been changed to reflect that.<\/em><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

Yupik artist Amber Webb is using a Sharpie to bring people face-to-face with a nationwide crisis.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

Years ago, a family friend of Webb’s went missing, and saw that after a while, attention to the friend faded and she became just another missing person.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

Webb began a project where she made an oversized qaspeq (which is sometimes spelled kuspuk) and drew portraits of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. She made one, which the Anchorage Museum purchased a couple years ago. Now she’s working on another one, one that is over 10 feet high and currently carries around 90 portraits. She says it will eventually carry about 300.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

“We’re not going to solve the problem unless people feel it,” Webb said, “so I was trying to do this kind of project to say, when you look at this many faces at once, you can’t just call it a statistic. These are people. These are people’s relatives. These are all of our relatives.”<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

On Wednesday afternoon, Webb watched as her in-progress qaspeq was raised in the Alaska State Capitol.<\/p>\n

\"Amber<\/a>

Amber Webb’s qaspeq hangs in room 106 of the Alaska State Capitol on Wednesday, May 1, 2019. (Alex McCarthy | Juneau Empire)<\/p><\/div>\t\t\t\t

Capitol Building Maintenance employees hung the huge qaspeq in a committee room on the second floor, where the House Tribal Affairs Committee will meet at 8 a.m. today. The committee will review House Resolution 10, which urges the U.S. Congress to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 without an exemption for tribal government. The resolution also asks Congress to support Savanna’s Act and highlight the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t

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Jade Williams. 2017. Kake, Alaska. #qaspeqproject #mmiw #mmiwg #nomorestolensisters<\/a><\/p>

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