Linda Infante Lyons creates paintings and murals with a focus on Alaskan Native portraits and local landscapes, flora and fauna. Her family is of Russian/Estonian and Alutiiq/Sugpiaq heritage from Kodiak Island. This ancestry closely informs her art practice. Bold shapes and vivid colors characterize her work, accented in her figurative paintings by patterning and traditional motifs. Infante Lyons’s portraits present an intriguing blend of European Icon painting and Native heritage and subject matter. In her works, a single figure centers the composition, haloed and cradling an animal, speaking to ties to the land and nature and her rich Alutiiq traditions.
Infante Lyons earned a Bachelor of Arts at Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, before moving to Chile where she lived for 18 years. She undertook additional studies at the Viña del Mar School of Fine Arts, Chile; The University of Alaska, Anchorage; and the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle, WA. Her paintings and photographs have been exhibited throughout Alaska and the greater U.S. and are included in the permanent collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, (Oberlin, OH), the Anchorage Museum of History and Art (Anchorage, AK), the Alaska State Museum (Juneau, AK), the Alaska Contemporary Art Bank (Anchorage, AK), the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository (Kodiak, AK), the Museum of the North (Fairbanks, AK), the Pratt Museum (Homer, AK) and the Denali National Park and Preserve (Denali, AK). She has received several awards, including a 2020 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant and fellowships with the Santa Fe Arts Institute and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She was awarded a Native Arts and Cultures National Artist Fellowship and in 2017 and 2020 earned a Rasmuson Foundation Fellowship. Infante Lyons’s art has appeared in First American Art Magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly, Cirque Literary Journal of the Pacific Northwest Rim, multiple book covers and Igaruacirpet, Our Way of Making Design, an Alutiiq design publication. She also teaches art to children and adults, traveling to rural Alaskan villages through the Alaska State Council on the Art's Artist in Schools Program, creating collaborative murals with local residents.
Infante Lyons lives in Anchorage, AK.
Instagram: @infantelyons_artist
