Devita Stipek Writer is an established Alaska artist and long-time Alaskan. She has been “painting Alaska” for over 50 years. Her work has achieved recognition in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest and around the world. It is estimated that - every year - over one million people from around the globe experience her public work. You may be one of them.

Devita's family came to Nome, Alaska, around 1900 during the Gold Rush. The Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome is named after her aunt, a colorful figure of Alaska's early days. Devita clearly remembers, as a child, meeting her elderly “Aunt Carrie” at their frequent family reunions.

At the age of 20, she married an Alaskan fisherman and accompanied him through a life of tragedy, hardship and adventure in the Alaska bush, raising a family in the remote fishing villages of coastal Alaska from Ketchikan to Kodiak.

If Alaska is her natural heritage, so is her artistic side. Devita is a direct descendant of French painter François Boucher, perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century. She attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Her work received early acclaim in exhibitions in New York City (ART:usa) and at the famous Atkins Museum in Kansas City and received the National Hallmark Award. Numerous awards and sold out exhibitions have followed in the years since.

Now in her early 70's, Devita is still actively painting and talks increasingly of a growing awareness of a fresh creative direction yet to be expressed through her brush. The next few years should be interesting.