Norman Akers, Where Are We Going, 2026, oil on canvas, 75 x 60 1/4 x 2 in. Courtesy the Artist. Photo: EG Schempf
ON VIEW
June 12 – December 6, 2026
October 1, 2026 · 6-8 PM
ARTIST TALK AND RECEPTION
Livestream option available
RSVP at nermanmuseum.org/calendar
Kansas Focus Gallery, First Floor
NERMAN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, JOHNSON COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE
FREE and Open to the Public
In these new works, Norman Akers (b. 1958; citizen of Osage Nation) fills his canvases with a web of cartographic iconography drawn from road maps, Osage philosophy, and his own visual vernacular. Using the Osage visual mnemonic of the elk, who serves as the herald seeking to get our attention to the ecological crises we are creating, Akers has constructed a series of images that serve as a call to arms.
Akers uses map elements to help us find familiar places while also laying claim to Osage homelands and sites within this spatial web. The elk moves through the spaces, navigating the space between the before and since of tribal removals, to the edge of the future upon which we teeter for balance. He allows the elk to fall, to crash, and for the empty currents of rivers to be transformed into electrical wires or razor wire, creating a trap from which the elk cannot escape without our intervention. The elk is the witness to this desecration. We are the transgressors being watched.
In this suite of six paintings, Akers wields the elk and the turtle as metaphors for the pristine state of nature, both depicted in distress. We are asked to consider our own role within the creation of the apocalypse. Each of us is caught in the same web of being, between the past and the future. There is no absolute end to this journey, only the recognition that we are on the journey together, sharing the only life raft with the earth itself.
— heather ahtone, Director, Curatorial Affairs, First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City, OK
Learn more about this exhibition at nermanmuseum.org.
