This museum in downtown Anchorage may house artefacts that are hundreds of years old, but its high-calibre collection—and its solid connection to the community—makes it feel like a living museum. Even though the art-gallery-sized space feels intimate, this is the largest private collection of its kind in Alaska. The museum was started by the First National Bank of Alaska in 1976, as a way for the bank’s owners, the Rasmussen family, to create a space for high-quality art and artefacts largely from Alaska's native tribes, such as the Northwest Coast Indian, Athabascan, Aleut, Yupik and Inupiaq tribes. Wells Fargo bought the museum in 2000 and has its own piece of Alaska history to share: the bank and delivery service used to ship gold out from the Klondike during the gold-rush days of the late 1800s and early 1900s, while also bringing in both miners and materials. To date, the museum’s collection now has about 6,000 artefacts and works of art, as well as 4,000 books, in museum branches around the state; this Anchorage flagship, though, has 900 pieces on display, including traditional clothing, a collection of historic Alaskan business tokens, a Bering Sea kayak covered in traditional seal skin, and paintings by such famed Alaskan artists as Sydney Laurence, Fred Machetanz and Eustace Ziegler. https://www.alaska.org/detail/alaska-heritage-museum-at-wells-fargo

Homesteaders. Entrepreneurs. Photographers. This petite, but very well-done museum in midtown Anchorage offers engaging proof of how the state of Alaska has been shaped - and is still being shaped - by a diverse community. It's open 1 pm - 6 pm Sunday through Thursday year-round (closed Friday and Saturday for the Jewish Sabbath). It takes only 15 minutes to see the exhibits, but you can also watch a 90-minute video about Warren Metzker, a legend of Alaska aviation who captained the Jewish airlift of Yemenite Jews to the newly-created state of Israel. Launched in the summer of 2013, the Alaska Jewish Museum was the brainchild of a group of Alaskans, led by Rabbi Joseph Greenberg of Anchorage’s Alaska Jewish Campus, who wanted to explore the Jewish history and culture that had made an impact on the state of Alaska - as well as the Alaskans who have made an impact on the larger Jewish community. They began by creating and partnering with various exhibits—for example, a 2013 exhibit hosted by the Anchorage Museum of Art about the work of Ruth Gruber. Though not an Alaska native herself, Gruber is a respected Jewish photojournalist who documented the early days of modern Israel and also spent time in Alaska decades ago, capturing valuable images of features and terrain that simply don’t exist anymore. https://www.alaska.org/detail/alaska-jewish-museum