Joan Arend Kickbush, Untitled

Joan Arend Kickbush, born March 23, 1926 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and died June 16, 2006 in Delafield, Wisconsin, was a popular Alaska artist focusing on Alaska Native children, Arctic wildlife, and Yupik villagers.

Kickbush attended Milwaukee State College and the Layton School of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In 1954, Kickbush and her husband, Roland, moved to Anchorage, Alaska where they both worked as a teachers and Kickbush painted. The Siberian Yupik village of Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island was her most popular subject.

In 1975 Kickbush and her husband left Alaska to live in the Lower 48 states including Oregon, California and Arizona. They eventually returned to her home state of Wisconsin. Kickbush continued to create art that expressed her love of Alaska and her new locales. She died near Milwaukee at age 80.

With few art galleries operating in Alaska early in her career, Kickbush exhibited her work in bank lobbies, craft shows, and the Westward Hotel in Anchorage. In 1964 she began exhibiting at the House of Wood, a local gallery in Fairbanks which continued to carry her work through the early 1990s.

Rather than painting with a brush, Kickbush used a palette knife, using the same palette knife for 25 years. Many of her paintings were framed by her husband using wood and burlap. She was known for her oil painting on masonite and watercolors, and influenced many later Alaska artists, such as Rie Muñoz and Barbara Lavallee .