Landing, Norman Akers (born 1958)

In his densely layered prints, Norman Akers challenges the idea of borders and boundaries. By playfully placing America’s founding fathers in spaceships as “aliens,” Akers emphasizes how colonizers invade space. His work connects the mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in North America to contemporary narratives about illegal immigrants, seeking solidarity rather than treating the situations as two separate issues. The two hands playing cat’s cradle—a children’s game using string—form a chain link fence, showing how borders are human-made.