Following the recent donation of a new piece of artwork, the Haines Sheldon Museum is planning a retrospective of noted oil painter Gil Smith’s art.
“A Legacy of Landscapes: Works by Gil Smith” will open at 5 p.m. on Friday, March 25.
Eighteen of Smith’s oils, watercolors and pastels will be on display in order of when they were created. Most of the work depicts the Chilkat Valley, specifically the view from his landmark stone-sided house near 8 Mile Haines Highway.
Ken and Eileen Watts of Haines Junction, Y.T., recently donated a Smith painting to the museum that Ken received as a going-away present from his employer, Canada Customs, in the 1970s. The couple ran the Cozy Corner Motel in Haines Junction for more than 10 years.
“We have a substantial collection of (Smith’s) paintings,” said museum community coordinator Madeline Witek. “He painted the Chilkat Valley, so it’s become a great place for his work to find a home since he spent most of his life here.”
Smith was a 29-year-old art school graduate when he arrived in Haines in 1940, paddling a kayak from Skagway. A Fort Seward soldier who served in the Pribilofs during World War II, Smith worked as a surveyor and as a laborer for the territorial road commission, but is best known for his landscape paintings.
They have hung in the Smithsonian Institution, the Alaska governor’s mansion, and several Alaska museums, according to biographical information from the Haines Sheldon Museum.
Smith was born in Jacksonville, Ill., in 1911 and died in New Mexico in 2000.
“A Legacy of Landscapes” will replace artist Kerry Cohen’s “WINTER reflections in clay” in the Elisabeth S. Hakkinen Gallery. Cohen’s ceramics exhibit will be on display through March 19.