Race for Place II

Artist Norman Akers (American, Osage, 1958)

Date2011

Mediumcolor monoprint

Dimensionsimage: 7 × 10 in. (17.8 × 25.4 cm)
sheet: 17 × 19 5/8 in. (43.2 × 49.8 cm)
mat: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)

Credit LineElisabeth Claire Lahti Fund

Label TextA member of the indigenous Osage Nation, Norman Akers creates colorful monoprints that often layer contemporary and pop culture imagery alongside references to his cultural heritage. For years, Akers alternated between painting and printmaking. However 15 years ago, printmaking became his preferred medium, whereas before it served as a way to make preliminary studies for his finished paintings. Akers notes that his training as a painter still comes through in his works. The prints juxtapose very flat elements with an illusion of space influenced by the canon of Western art traditions. While many prints may appear two-dimensional and graphic, Akers works to create depth by densely layering his relatively small prints. He uses found images to create intricate cut-out collages that are turned into monoprints, and Race for Place II consists of three layers of imagery. The back-most layer depicts a clash between Native Americans and settlers. On the left-hand side, Native Americans commandeering birch bark or dugout canoes make landfall in a wooded area. In the center of the image, Native Americans, armed with bows and arrows, battle ax-wielding settlers. Dying or wounded bodies are strewn throughout the scene. The battle continues to the upper right corner. The next layer depicts two hands, palms facing outward toward viewers. A web of string is intertwined between the thumb and forefinger on each hand, reminiscent of cat’s cradle—a game ubiquitous in cultures around the world for hundreds of years. Finally, the work is layered with images of birds, UFOs, and a Lakota Sioux man. The latter image was found in an old Merriam-Webster dictionary as the illustration for tom-tom. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln hover above the scene in flying saucers, looking for a place to land. Akers borrows these two portraits from the ones used on U.S. currency. The birds in this work, like the silhouette of the scissor-tailed flycatcher on the left-hand side, symbolize migration. Akers uses humor to speak to ideas of identity, colonialism, immigration, and migration. The works addressed political themes, but he doesn’t think of himself as a political activist. In a 2020 talk for Kansas State University, Akers said that from an indigenous perspective, everyone in the United States is an immigrant, and that the instinct to search for a better life is universal. [Collection Highlight]

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