PAINTINGS

garage to gallery

Originally from Washington State and now based in Juneau, Sara Little began her journey with acrylic paint as a young girl. She spent her evenings closely observing her father, Gordon Little, as he painted abstract textured landscapes in desert hues, representations of their family’s time in the Southwest. In college, Sara spent several years working in gallery spaces, combining her multidisciplinary education in Environmental Studies and Anthropology with her upbringing as an artist.

acrylic on wood

This series of paintings on display is an attempt to bridge her family’s ties to the Southwest with that of the Pacific Northwest and Southeast Alaska. Sara takes inspiration from the work of Georgia O'Keeffe to paint iconic subjects in Lingít Aaní, reaching for lands that have shaped her recent personal and family history. Abstract line work and vibrant colors can be traced to her father’s art. Muted tones with blended paint suggest hints of O’Keeffe and the Southwest. The sense of whimsy, playfulness, and selection of favorite subjects from Southeast Alaska are her own.

Alaska Robotics Gallery

2025

curator and participating artist

acrylic on canvas

Developed and funded with the support of the David Nord Award, which encourages engagement critical issues facing LGBTQIA+ communities through a variety of creative and scholarly mediums.

Queer ecology investigates what our society and science views as “natural.” The aim is to demonstrate diverse sexual and gender expressions within our natural world, as well as how and why we apply certain labels to otherwise unlabeled areas of life and behavior ... Meaning, the task of queer ecology is not to apply human labels to flora and fauna as if they naturally fall within these constructed boxes, but to compare behavior and biology across species in order to broaden our narratives of the natural world and queerness within it. The fluidity of nature’s boundaries and diversity of experience allow LGBTQIA+ individuals to find a home within a space they have largely been excluded from: the so-called natural world. From discovering same-sex relationships in animals to understanding the ways that flowers or fungi escape the mainstream gender binary, queer ecology affirms the place of LGBTQIA+ individuals in nature and as natural.

Stevens Gallery

2022

"As I walk through campus or the forest where I live, I am drawn towards the flora which exist outside of our sexual and gendered binary in their own natural right. My work is about those that have odd biology, queer functions, ‘peculiar growth.’ The ginkgo tree can grow as one sex its whole life, or change sex later on. The eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly can mature with more than one sex characteristic in the same body – adding a new layer to our symbolic understanding of a butterfly’s metamorphosis. This has also been seen in birds, crustaceans, spiders, and others. Similarly, ‘perfect flowers,’ like lilies and roses, have both masc (pollen producing) and femme (seed producing) reproductive parts. Then there’s fungi. Mushrooms can have non-binary sexual compatibility. They have sexual functions that don’t easily situate within a binary of two sexual anatomies. Though it may not always be obvious, this sexual and gender fluidity parallels the human queer community. A plethora of flora and fauna exhibit similar characteristics and know – on a deeper and biological level - what it is to grow in a queer body. While queer ecology pushes us to decenter humans, it also provides a lens through which we can find affinity with the natural world and, with it, a home within nature."