Scroll down for information about Jenny Lyn and her work.
Award winning Alaskan artist Jenny Lyn Smith, is regarded by many as the Northwest’s best woman carver of wood and silver in the totemic tradition. Her childhood interest in art included drawing and painting and she carved all through high school in California. After graduating in 1967, she came to Haines with her parents, imbued with a desire “to carve a totem pole.”She trained under such noted carvers as Leo Jacobs Sr., John Hagen and Johnny Avatock, working in both wood and silver, and learned silk screening from Nathan Jackson.
Jenny helped carve the world’s tallest totem pole which was exhibited at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan and is now in Kake, Alaska. You can find her work world-wide now, from Japan to Scandinavia; on totems at the Waster Airlines pavilion in Los Angeles; at the Alaska ferry terminal in Seattle where one of her masks is on display.
Jenny has kept close to the traditions of Northwest Indian art – she was adopted into the Raven Clan of the Tlingit people in 1977 – but creates her own designs within those traditions. She was adopted as aL'uknaxhadi by Lillian Hammond, mother of Tommie Jimmie Sr. and Charles Jimmie Sr., both master carvers in the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
Jenny helped carve the world’s tallest totem pole which was exhibited at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan and is now in Kake, Alaska. You can find her work world-wide now, from Japan to Scandinavia; on totems at the Waster Airlines pavilion in Los Angeles; at the Alaska ferry terminal in Seattle where one of her masks is on display.
Jenny has kept close to the traditions of Northwest Indian art – she was adopted into the Raven Clan of the Tlingit people in 1977 – but creates her own designs within those traditions. She was adopted as aL'uknaxhadi by Lillian Hammond, mother of Tommie Jimmie Sr. and Charles Jimmie Sr., both master carvers in the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
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