Clayton Conner grew up in Los Angeles, but said that he considers Napaskiak a second home. He usually comes for weeks at a time, spending concentrated hours working around the school in paint splattered pants, with intermittent smoke breaks.
“I've almost kind of been adopted by Joe and his family,” Conner said. “Every time I even go to the other villages I always fly through here. I stop here. I have family here, you know. They've welcomed me with open arms.”
Joe Bavilla, administrative assistant at Napaskiak's Z. John Williams Memorial School, agreed. “He’s been at my house a lot to feed, get some Native food in him. Then he goes, 'Oh, I better go back to work.'”
Bavilla gave Conner his Yup'ik name: Minguugista, which means painter. Conner was first hired in 2019 when the village had built a new school and had money in the budget for art. They’ve hired him back about a half a dozen times since, and he stops by whenever he’s in the region.
Recently, Conner headed back to the school on official business. He's finally giving Bavilla a mural in his front office.
“I thought, 'I want a hawk up there. I really do,'” Bavilla said. “I want to see a very nice, good-looking hawk.”
The school’s mascot is a hawk, and Bavilla had an idea to make the feathers out of handprints. This isn’t Conner’s style. He likes details, hidden signs and symbols. People love pointing out the little figures he hid in the grass in one mural. But he doesn’t mind. He used the students' handprints in trees on the walls the day before. Now he's enlisting staff.
“I'm here to do what I'm here to do and make them happy,” Conner said. “So if that's what they want, that's what they get, you know.”
Conner had a mural company in Los Angeles before he moved north in 2012. In 2015, he moved to Alaska and started a gallery in Skagway selling art to tourists, but he preferred murals. He was hired by Napaskiak and other Lower Kuskokwim School District schools after people saw his murals in Quinhagak, but he and Bavilla said that Napaskiak wanted something different.
“Everything is in sepia tone. And they saw it, they liked the artwork, but like, 'No, we want color. Color, color, lots of color,” said Conner.
Bavilla added, “You know, we don't want to see black and white. We want to see a lot of color.”
“So tons, and tons, and tons of color here,” Conner said.
Bavilla said that the community thought deeply about what they wanted to see in their school when coming up with the designs.
Elisa Steven is an artist who has taught at the school for 25 years, teaching Yugtun for 23. She said that her grandfather founded Napaskiak; it was his fish camp.
“I came up with an idea that I would start from spring,” Steven said. “The first one subsistence smelts, the fish. After fishing we do picking berries, and then from there we do moose hunting.”
They continued onto dog mushing and snow machines, and then back to break-up. The large mural in the main room of the school shows the endless seasons of growth. But most of all, villagers wanted to honor their Elders. Conner figured that he would put a handful on each side of the entry hallway to the school.
“And then I show up, I'm like, ‘Okay, well how many pictures? How many Elders do you have pictures of?’" Conner said.
It turns out that they had 54 photos. Conner said that he didn’t mind. He just had to change the composition and get to work.
“Each person I was painting, [Bavilla] would come up and sit there and tell me all the stories about them,” Conner said. “You know, say this person you're painting here, they did this, they did that, they’re this type of person.”
Now, anyone who walks into the school is surrounded by village Elders and ancestors: the people who made Napaskiak, Napaskiak. And they’re painted in all of the colors of a psychedelic rainbow.
Alex Larson pointed up to two faces on the wall: his grandparents. Like many in the village, he’s related to someone on the walls of the school. He pointed down the hall at his maternal uncles, his great-grandparents, and even his godparents gazing down from the walls.
Larson has his own mural, a bigger one, on the winter wall. He’s being carried by a team of dogs through wintry flurries, inspired by his reputation as a talented musher. Kids can name the faces too, even people they’ve never met.
By now, the entire school is covered in Conner’s art. Looking over the cafeteria is a piece showing the cafeteria workers at fish camp. Connor worked 3D wooden salmon, nets, and driftwood into pieces. There are replicas of ancient Napaskiak masks over the water fountains. In the high school hallway it’s more modern, with Elders in graffiti-style spray paint.
And it’s not just the people Conner has immortalized on the walls. There's also a small-scale rendition of the old Napaskiak. Conner drafted this mural by studying old photographs. Larson looked at it and said that he remembered it all that way. “The first village. The lower Napaskiak, the real Napas,” Larson said.
Here's the old school. There, the old, smaller Eastern Orthodox church. Larson points to trails on the mural.
“We had no steps like this. We had the ground itself,” Larson said. “We had walkways where there was no grass. You know, people walking back and forth, it'll be smooth.”
Larson remembered following those trails to fish camp. In the spring, his grandfather would build boats.
“They let us work on boats like this. They'd be there, and we'd be, as kids, helping them painting," Larson said. "We become painters as springtime comes.”
