ALASKA is our largest state and the least densely populated. A traveler wishing to visit Juneau, the capital, must take a car ferry because it isn’t accessible by road. The state has 22 indigenous languages. Its main exports are extracted from the ground (oil, gas) and the sea (salmon, cod). State government imposes neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Climates include oceanic, arctic and subarctic, and climatic extremes, in Fairbanks, include 80-degree summer days and 50-below-zero winter days.

   A U.S. state since 1959, Alaska is part of America and yet somehow distinct.

   The phrase “the lower 48,” which refers to the 48 U.S. states located south of the Canadian border, “hints at the idea that Alaska is also culturally separate — that somehow what is Alaskan is unique from what is simply ‘American,’” says Julie Decker, who curates art and architecture at the Anchorage Museum and teaches art history for the University of Alaska.

   The rich tradition of Alaskan art and architecture, reaching back from Native peoples to contemporary artists, has changed and grown remarkably over the past 30 years, Ms. Decker says in an e-mail interview.

   ”Today a great diversity of styles, techniques and inspirations makes up the contemporary art of Alaska. Artists are reacting to national trends, to international events, to other artists both in the state and outside, and, often, to place — to Alaska itself. Often their works serve to articulate contemporary life in the North, through ideas and images ever more complex and sophisticated than pure landscape.”

   Ms. Decker is the curator of Dry Ice: Alaska Native Artists and the Landscape, on view in the Arts Council of Princeton’s Paul Robeson Center for the Arts Taplin Gallery through Nov. 21.

   The exhibit is correlated with Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories of Bering Strait at the Princeton University Art Museum, an exhibit that highlights 2,000 years of artistry and life practices of hunters living near the Bering Strait. Dry Ice aims to update that exhibit, bringing its concerns to the present day.

   ”Alaska Native cultures are living cultures,” Ms. Decker says. Dry Ice “offers a contemporary counterpoint to ‘Gifts from the Ancestors’ — illustrating that the cultures have great history and depth and that Alaska Native artists and other artists of the North continue to explore materials, reflect upon their surroundings and their way of life, and break tradition.”

   Dry ice refers to frozen carbon dioxide that rapidly changes from a solid to a gas when removed from a frigid environment. It is meant to evoke the changing Alaskan landscape.

   ”The changes in climate are probably more noticeable in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet,” Ms. Decker says. “The Arctic cap is expected to disappear in the next 20 years. This is crucial habitat for an entire ecosystem — polar bears, whales, seals, fish and humans — the indigenous people of the Alaskan Arctic.”

   Nine contemporary artists are represented in Dry Ice. They explore their relationship to the landscape through a variety of forms and media, including video, photography and wood sculpture.

   Anna Hoover’s “Skin of the Earth” presents an assemblage of Kidakada Japanese handmade paper. Printed on the paper are postcard-sized landscape photographs of forests and seas. These individual scenes are stitched together with linen twine to form panels that look like puzzle pieces. Ms. Hoover has taken similar panels and stitched them together to form globes. Each globe hangs above a twisted orange peel placed on a white monolith. All the shapes echo each other and give the impression of a fragile world stitched together and coming apart.

   ”Layers of meaning and resources/ Products of the mine/ Trees, minerals and water/ Taken for the liking/ Sampled by machines and transformed,” writes Ms. Hoover, who was raised in southwestern Alaska.

   How can art help us understand the changes taking place in the world?

   ”Artists are acute observers,” Ms. Decker says. “They bring a thoughtful, first-hand perspective. These artists have historical and contemporary connections to the Alaskan environment and bring a point of view that spans generations.”

   Artists have long been drawn to Alaska, she adds, especially those drawn to the state’s extreme and dramatic elements. “Some of the works touch on universal trends, but still focus the atypical nature of the work and the tie to Alaskan culture,” Ms. Decker says. “The works represent a turning point. They are observational but also look at the individual’s role in affecting a response to our changing landscape.”

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  Dry Ice: Alaska Native Artists and the Landscape is on view in the Arts Council of Princeton’s Paul Robeson Center for the Arts Taplin Gallery, 122 Witherspoon St., Princeton, through Nov. 21; www.artscouncilofprinceton.org