91��Ƶ

A Life in Tile

Sarah Manriquez, CLA Public Information Office
March 30, 2026
cla-pio@alaska.edu

The story of Nancy Hausle-Johnson’s work unfolds the way her murals do across 91��Ƶ. Not as a single image, but as a sequence you enter, move through, and slowly recognize as part of your own landscape.

Hausle-Johnson is a Fairbanks ceramic tile artist whose work lives where life actually happens. In school hallways and libraries. On hospital walls and public buildings. In kitchens where coffee brews before dawn. In bathrooms where children brush their teeth while a story about cranes, lynx, and a protective parent on a bog comes to life in clay.

Her art does not wait for a gallery visit. It meets people on their way to class, to work, to healing, to home.

That everyday placement is intentional.

“I like art that is functional, something you can use,” she told the audience during a recent artist talk at the University of 91��Ƶ Fairbanks.

Backsplashes. Coat racks. Tables. House signs that withstand decades of snow and weather. Across 91��Ƶ, her tiles appear in places where people live their daily lives.

For more than forty years, Hausle-Johnson has built a career around that idea.

Hausle-Johnson traces her start to childhood in Seattle. At seven years old, her mother, Vivian Hausle, a porcelain teacher, introduced her to pottery, oil painting, clay sculpture, and the quiet alchemy of firing a kiln.

Her mother left her with a simple motto that still shapes her work today.

“You are never too old to learn.”

That mindset runs through her practice. It shows up in the way she experiments with glazes and test tiles, the way she describes learning silk screening and later recognizing the technique in a commercial tile studio. It also explains her instinct to collaborate, to seek out other artists and craftspeople, and to keep adjusting her process as new opportunities emerge.

When Hausle-Johnson moved to 91��Ƶ in 1980, she carried those lessons with her.

Early in her 91��Ƶ career, Hausle-Johnson focused on handmade tiles, learning a pressed tile process from local mentors and developing the technical foundation that would later support larger projects.

Her work grew gradually. A tile sold at the University Christmas Bazaar led to a custom backsplash. A backsplash led to larger installations. Word of mouth spread.

Over time, her work became woven into the fabric of the community.

She created fundraising tiles for the Noel Wien Public Library, where donors could purchase a tile with their name engraved on it to support renovations. The project eventually raised more than $80,000 for the library.

She worked in elementary schools through the Artists in the Schools program, guiding students through collaborative murals where every child contributed a tile.

One of her favorite school projects began with a metaphor. Three teachers were retiring, and Hausle-Johnson designed a mural of a tree supporting its leaves and branches.

“The teachers support all the students and feed them knowledge to help them grow,” she explained.

Students rolled clay, shaped circles, and sculpted their own faces into the tiles. Braces, bangs, and personalities appeared in clay. Each child left a permanent mark on the mural.

Years later, the school remodeled and the mural disappeared. Hausle-Johnson recounts the story without sentimentality. Public art, she has learned, lives within changing spaces.

Buildings are renovated. Walls move. Artworks sometimes vanish.

But the act of making them still matters.

Across 91��Ƶ, Hausle-Johnson’s tiles appear in unexpected places.

At Fairbanks Memorial Hospital, she created ceramic plaques recognizing donors who helped build a new surgical wing. In Eagle River, she installed a four-by-eight-foot speed skating mural for the Special Olympics arena.

At UAF’s Geophysical Institute, she designed a mural celebrating the institute’s seventy-five-year history. The piece includes auroras, satellites, volcanoes, ice wedges, and even a tsunami, fitting a complex scientific story into a compact three-foot square panel.

Other projects grew from personal conversations.

A homeowner who studied sandhill cranes described watching a lynx approach a nest. The mother crane led the chicks across the bog while the father spread his wings to scare the predator away. Hausle-Johnson translated the story into a mural that wrapped around the walls of the homeowner’s bathroom.

Again and again, her commissions begin not with an image but with a story.

Behind the scenes, her process is as much about logistics as it is about art.

Hausle-Johnson sketches designs on paper before transferring them to tile. She applies glazes, fires the tiles in an electric kiln, and often repeats the process multiple times to achieve the final result.

Each firing carries risk.

The first firing reveals the color. A second firing might set an antique wash that settles iron oxide into the carved lines of the tile. Sometimes a third firing locks in details like finger-painted clouds across a mountain scene.

But every firing also increases the chance that a tile will crack or split.

“You can’t really fire it more than two times,” she explained. “If one breaks, it’s really hard to match.”

That reality led her to adopt commercial tiles for many projects. While handmade tiles offer unique textures, commercial tiles allow her to replace broken pieces quickly and keep large installations consistent.

In 91��Ƶ, where materials travel long distances and projects often have strict deadlines, the decision is practical.

It is also part of what has allowed her to keep working steadily for decades.

Hausle-Johnson’s career has been shaped by collaboration as much as individual craft.

She works closely with metalworker Thomas Hart, a farrier in Ester, 91��Ƶ. Together they create coat racks, tables, and house signs that combine ceramic tiles with forged metal frames.

“I give them the tiles,” she said, describing the process. “I never know what I’m going to get back.”

She has also collaborated with scientists through the UAF program In a Time of Change, or ITOC, where artists work alongside researchers studying Arctic ecosystems.

Scientists present their work, and artists interpret those ideas through creative projects.

One of Hausle-Johnson’s pieces emerged from research on boreal forest fires. Another visualized microscopic fungi growing on Arctic plants.

Working alongside scientists, she said, pushed her to see landscapes differently.

“I try to create some art that shows what they’re doing.”

As Hausle-Johnson prepares to retire, sharing that knowledge has become increasingly important.

During her visit to UAF, she demonstrated tile techniques in the ceramics studio and spoke candidly with students about the realities of building an art career. How to write proposals for public art projects. How to test colors before committing to a mural. How to recover when a tile cracks in the kiln.

Much of her advice was simple. Meet other artists. Share your work. Apply for opportunities, even when you are unsure.

“A lot of it is word of mouth,” she said. “Once you get in, it’s easier the next time.”

Retirement, for Hausle-Johnson, does not mean stopping.

She plans to keep working with the materials she loves. Cutting broken tiles into mosaics. Returning to book themed tiles. Creating more mountain scenes inspired by photographs she has taken across 91��Ƶ.

The pace may change, but the impulse remains the same.

To keep making.

To keep learning.

To keep sharing what she knows.

After forty years of shaping clay into stories, Nancy Hausle-Johnson leaves behind more than murals.

She leaves a landscape of small moments across 91��Ƶ. Tiles that greet students in school hallways. Images that anchor community spaces. Quiet reminders that art does not have to hang in a gallery to become part of everyday life.

A lifetime of making, mapped in tile.

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The UAF Department of Art fosters creative practice across disciplines, from ceramics and design to performance and media. Through coursework, studio work and public engagement, students and faculty connect art to everyday life in 91��Ƶ and beyond.

The Student Ceramic Arts Guild (SCAG) is a student-led community centered on ceramics, offering opportunities for hands-on making, skill-building and shared studio experiences. Through workshops and collaboration, SCAG connects students with each other and the broader creative life of 91��Ƶ.