Norman Akers: Calling for Home

You may never find yourself in remote Manhattan, Kansas, 120 miles west of Kansas City. If you ever do, make sure to visit the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art on the charming campus of Kansas State University. Admission is free. Two paintings from the permanent collection would be worth paying good money to admire.

The first is Birger Sandzén’s (1871–1954) gumdrop fantasy landscape, Still Water (1926). Sandzén is one of my favorite Western artists and I’ve only seen one painting of his superior to this.

The second is Norman Akers’ (b. 1958; Wahzhazhi/Osage) Calling for Home (2023). An elk bugles against the backdrop of a road map from northeastern Oklahoma where Akers was born. The Osage reservation. A variety of symbolic objects fill the painting – blood running, houses, a Christian church, a road, a river, windmills, clouds. The brilliant elk, a prototypical adult male with regal antlers, dominates.

Akers’ imagery specifically relates to Osage culture, beginning with the elk. The Osage have a creation story about the formation of land in which the elk plays a central role. The animal is symbolic of the land itself.

As Akers shared in a talk for the Saint Louis Museum of Art, when the earth was covered with water, the elk called upon the winds. The winds blew the water up into a mist, creating dry land for the Osage to live upon. The elk’s antlers and its tines are the rivers. The elk’s back formed the hills. The animal’s hair was mixed with the mud to become grass.

Norman Akers 'Calling for Home,' 2023, elk detail. Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art

The Tallgrass Prairie

Prior to their forced removal at the hands of European colonizers, much of present-day Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas where the four states come together were Osage homelands. The tallgrass prairie. Along with people, the prairie was full of elk. The continent was full of elk. The animal ranged from New York to South Carolina all the way west into the Rocky Mountains.

The white man’s cities, agriculture, and hunting pushed the elk to its present-day range, the Rockies, the Front Range, and spots along the Pacific Coast, a sliver of where it once roamed. The story of the elk recalls the story of the bison, but where as the bison is one of the most common subjects in Native American and Western art, not so the elk.

“This whole painting, in a sense, is about that notion of calling home, but realizing that the landscape has been decimated,” Akers said.

Only 4% percent of the tallgrass prairie the Osage and elk once called home remains. Home isn’t what it used to be.

The elk calling for their homeland, having been pushed out. The Osage calling for their homeland, having been pushed out. But what is the condition of that homeland? Roads and towns. Windmills.

Notice the windmills on the righthand side of Calling for Home.

Despite winning a major court decision in December of 2023, the Osage remain locked in litigation with Enel energy over an illegal wind project the Italian company built on Osage land without required permitting from the tribe.

The Flint Hills, an area running through eastern Kansas with Manhattan near the top and the Osage Nation over the border in Oklahoma the southern boundary, holds the largest remaining intact sections of tallgrass prairie.

“Growing up there, even as a kid, I can remember being out on the prairie and those high spots where you could see like a good distance. What always struck me about the prairie – and I think some people get unnerved by the vastness of it, and what they perceive as the emptiness – I don't see it as being empty,” Akers said. “No, it's full of life.”

One out of every 40 plant species in the world can be found in the Flint Hills along with more than 100 species of grasshopper.

“The beauty about the prairie is, from a point where you're standing and you're looking off at that horizon, miles and miles away, there's so much you cannot see,” Akers continued. “If you've ever waded through grass in the prairie, there's a lot of things you can't see that are very close to you. I like the notion of that invisible world. Also, the prairie to me is a place where things can happen, and these narratives and these stories exist. When I look out there, I see it as a place of possibilities.”

 Norman Akers 'Calling for Home,' 2023, detail. Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art

Maps

Akers has been fascinated by maps since he was a kid. He collected them. Neighbors and family friends picked up on this and brought him theirs. He kept them in a box, wondering what those places were like, never thinking about being able to actually visit, growing up rurally on the reservation as he did.

Akers would learn that maps do more than provide instruction on how to get from here to there.

“Those maps are a result of years and years of colonialism and someone else trying to define our land,” Akers said.

People and history can be removed from places by changing their names. Erasure. That’s why it’s important to Indigenous people for place names to be returned to their indigenous titles.

I was curious about what appears to be lunchboxes outlined at the bottom of Akers’ masterpiece.

“Those boxes, they're related to some of our funeral practices, and I’ll just kind of leave it at that,” Akers said.

Akers is not the first Native artist to withhold detailed explanations from me about the full meaning of every object portrayed in an artwork. I take no offense to this. As an arts writer and reporter, it’s my job to ask. The artist is under no obligation to answer.

Not all information is meant for all people. That’s a notion I’ve found central to Indigenous cultures, one not shared by the white culture I come from.

“I used to talk about things a lot more until we started going on Zoom and then I realized every word I was saying was being recorded,” Akers, who sits on the Osage tribal advisory council, said. “We deal a lot with culturally sensitive information.”

Information that has historically been misrepresented and abused by outsiders.

“The notion of things being desecrated… the Osages, our traditional homelands, particularly when you look at Missouri and Arkansas, there's been a lot of looting. Those piled up boxes are making a reference to that notion of our (funerary) sites being looted,” Akers added.

An Osage or another Native person may pick up on that iconography right away. I did not.

Norman Akers 'Calling for Home,' 2023. Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art

“All of my symbols that I work with have multiple meanings. Sometimes my goal is to be slippery,” Akers said, chuckling. “Who am I communicating to? An Osage may look at my work and clearly get what I'm talking about, but also I'm interested in communicating with a broader audience. I try to create these layered symbols, they have multiple meanings, so that everybody who comes to the work can pick up on some sort of narrative that they relate to.”

Multiple meanings like the prominent raindrops. Or are they?

“Those teardrops or those raindrops, I think about the notion of rain clearing away, but also I think about the notion of tears, and tears are a very human element,” Akers explained. “We cry when we're happy, we cry when we're sad. It doesn't matter where you come from, those tears are shed.”

Tears shed for a desecrated homeland that can never truly be returned to again.

“There's an element of sadness,” Akers said of Calling for Home. “There's an element of reclaiming the place.”

As for the black splotch on the painting’s left when looking at it?

“This is one of those things just as a painter, I had originally planned on putting those stumps in that I usually put in the landscape, and I just went, ‘No, I can't do that again,” Akers explained. His paintings often feature tree stumps, referencing another Osage origin story. “I was a little bit baffled. I had this shape that I had painted that didn't have – there was no connection. It was just that dark shape sitting there, and I wasn't quite sure why I painted it other than I needed it for composition. Then I just flipped and decided, oh, it's going to be a tree, and that tree came in there and I put those houses in that dark space to fill it.”

When attempting to “read” a painting – understand its marks and symbols and imagery and iconography – think of it like song lyrics. Some are deeply profound, others are gibberish to get to the chorus.

Akers has completed about 10 large-scale elk paintings. Each is roughly 3x4 feet. They are much more profound than gibberish. Increasingly, they have an environmental activism bent. In addition to the Beach Museum at KSU, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Wichita Art Museum have one in their permanent collections. One can also be seen at the Scottsdale (Arizona) Museum of Contemporary Art through January 5, 2025, during the exhibition, “Exploding Native Inevitable.”