Dale DeArmond was an American printmaker, author, and book illustrator best known for wood engravings and woodcuts drawn from the mythology and folklore of Alaska. Born Dale Frances Burlison on July 2, 1914, on a homestead near Dickinson, North Dakota (many sources list her birthplace as Bismarck), she moved as a child to St. Paul and then Tacoma, Washington. In 1935 she married Robert Neil "Bob" DeArmond, a Sitka-born Alaskan who became a noted state historian, and she spent the rest of her life in Alaska — Sitka, Pelican, Ketchikan, and Juneau — serving as director of the Juneau city library from 1958 to 1979.
A 1959–60 woodcutting workshop with Wisconsin artist Danny Pierce turned her decisively toward printmaking; she took up wood engraving in 1978, which became her preferred medium until she retired from printmaking in 1999. Over her career she produced more than 400 prints and wrote and illustrated numerous books, the first of which, Juneau: A Book of Woodcuts, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for best illustrated book in 1973.
Much of her mature work centered on the oral traditions of Alaska Native peoples, which she researched extensively and treated as a living body of material worth carrying into print. She drew most heavily on Tlingit and Haida legend — above all the Raven cycle, in which the trickster-creator shapes the world — as in Raven: A Collection of Woodcuts (1975), and also adapted Yup'ik and Iñupiaq, Athabaskan, and Aleut narratives. Her engagement was not only that of a researcher at a distance: she traveled to Native communities and undertook commissioned work at their invitation.
Her Nondalton series of the 1970s grew from that Athabascan village's wish to place artwork illustrating its own legends in a new school, and was produced under Alaska's Percent for Art program; the prints later illustrated a published collection of Dena'ina stories. Work of this kind also appeared in collaborations with anthropologists, including her engravings for Frederica de Laguna's Tales from the Dena (1995).
She described the myths and folk tales of Alaska Native people as "a rich fund of subjects" for an artist who thought of herself first as an illustrator of stories. Her prints are held in numerous institutional collections, including the Alaska State Museum.
She died in Sitka on November 21, 2006, at ninety-two.
A 1959–60 woodcutting workshop with Wisconsin artist Danny Pierce turned her decisively toward printmaking; she took up wood engraving in 1978, which became her preferred medium until she retired from printmaking in 1999. Over her career she produced more than 400 prints and wrote and illustrated numerous books, the first of which, Juneau: A Book of Woodcuts, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for best illustrated book in 1973.
Much of her mature work centered on the oral traditions of Alaska Native peoples, which she researched extensively and treated as a living body of material worth carrying into print. She drew most heavily on Tlingit and Haida legend — above all the Raven cycle, in which the trickster-creator shapes the world — as in Raven: A Collection of Woodcuts (1975), and also adapted Yup'ik and Iñupiaq, Athabaskan, and Aleut narratives. Her engagement was not only that of a researcher at a distance: she traveled to Native communities and undertook commissioned work at their invitation.
Her Nondalton series of the 1970s grew from that Athabascan village's wish to place artwork illustrating its own legends in a new school, and was produced under Alaska's Percent for Art program; the prints later illustrated a published collection of Dena'ina stories. Work of this kind also appeared in collaborations with anthropologists, including her engravings for Frederica de Laguna's Tales from the Dena (1995).
She described the myths and folk tales of Alaska Native people as "a rich fund of subjects" for an artist who thought of herself first as an illustrator of stories. Her prints are held in numerous institutional collections, including the Alaska State Museum.
She died in Sitka on November 21, 2006, at ninety-two.