The William A. Egan Civic & Convention Center offers 35,000 square feet and went through a multi-million-dollar revitalization project not long ago. The Egan Center – boasted as the most configurable space in Alaska – includes a beautiful 19,000 square foot Ballroom and more than 11,000 square feet of meeting space that can be configured into 14 separate breakouts.
The Egan Center’s most prominent feature displays eight Ficus trees living inside the glass Foyer. Sharing this beautiful space with these trees are Native Alaska art pieces that rival those in any museum.
The Egan Lobby has three pieces of art in the lobby. They were funded from the Municipality's One Percent for Arts Program. One percent of the building's construction cost goes to purchase art.
- Volcano Woman (east end of lobby): The first piece of art is called the Volcano Woman. It tells the ancient Aleut creation myth of how the Aleutian Islands were populated. According to the myth, cormorants lived on the islands before people. One day they saw a woman coming up from the crater of a volcano. The birds transformed themselves into humans and mated with the woman. Then the cormorants carried the children in their beaks to all the Aleutian Islands. The eight abstract human shapes you see surrounding the female figure and the four cormorants serve as guardians of the myth. Volcano woman was carved of 300-year-old western red cedar by artist John Hoover.
- Eskimo Spirit Carvings: This display features five sculptures. Four based on traditional Eskimo masks, and one full-figured whaler with a harpoon. All are united by the Eskimo belief in the spirit. They believe that all living things have a spirit and are therefore reincarnated. Artist Melvin Alanna used jawbones of a whale to carve three of the sculptures and black walnut for the other two. He used native Alaskan materials for the decorative elements including wolverine and polar bear fur, bearded seal rawhide, reindeer horn and baleen.
- Beaded Sky Curtain: The beaded sky curtain captures the feel of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights). It is made with 5 million glass beads, hand strung by 8 people over a 10-month period. A total of 2,300 separate color-coded strands are draped in varying lengths and are suspended from 24 steel rods. The beads are 6 1/2 miles long and the entire piece weighs 320 pounds. They back stitched every three inches around anchoring beads to keep the weight spread evenly.
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