Brad Hughes, the Homer artist whose commercial signs, public sculptures and “Spit-toons” comic books celebrated and lampooned Alaska’s hippie generation, died May 28, 2024 after a long illness. He was 77.
An iconic figure in his home town, Hughes’ work reached statewide, with daffy moose signs for the Alaska State Fair and a large salmon sculpture for Seward’s Alaska Sealife Center. His last work was a somber “memorial bench” in Homer for missing and murdered love ones.
William Bradley Hughes was born July 23, 1946 in Norfolk, Va. He first came to Alaska in 1967 as a Baptist missionary assigned to villages in the Yukon Flats. He said his rigid theology proved no match for the Native spirituality and practical concerns he found during a winter in Chalkytsik. He then moved to Seward and clashed with fundamentalists there.
His faith crippled, Brad returned south to attend a seminary, where he fell in with draft resisters and Black Panthers and was radicalized when he was jailed for protests.
A psychedelic odyssey across the American West followed, bringing him again to Alaska and to the Homer Spit in 1972 as part of a back-to-the-land settlement wave. He found work around town painting commercial signs, while his artwork was featured at the local museum and his painted sets at the summer Pier One theater.
In Homer, he is remembered in part for his role in the famous “Club Bar Incident” of 1976. When the noted hippie watering hole was rebuilt after a fire, it reopened with Brad’s street-facing mural of a rising phoenix attended by Adam and Eve, both of them naked and viewed frontally. A protest meeting spilled out of the city council chambers but turned its wrath instead on a viciously anti-semitic handout from a local crackpot preacher who blamed the mural on Homer’s “cryptoJews.” (The mural nudity was subsequently tidied up.)
The four editions of his Spit-toons comic book featured the adventures of Nimroy Zilch, T.J. Toad, Blatz the stoned space dog, and Brad’s alter-ego, Captain Aardvark, set among the ramshackle homesteads and leaky fishing boats of Homer’s “hippie invasion” era.
In later life, Brad served as a hospice volunteer and was a gentle and supportive teacher for several generations of aspiring artists. His art-teaching mantra was “You have to blow on the fire that’s already there.”
After a life devoted to the subjects of humor and beauty, his final sculpting of a memorial bench inspired by the murder of a young local woman, Duffy Murnane, felt both urgent and soul-crushing, Brad said.
He is survived by his wife, Judy Hughes, as well as his daughter from a first marriage, Angie Wolenetz, three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
His daughter recalled the great belly laugh with which Brad expressed his love of life: “If my dad was in a movie theater, you knew it.”
