Landing

Norman Akers, artist

Cultural affiliations: Osage

born 1958

Landing, 2019

Where object was made: United States

Material/technique: photopolymer plate relief print

Dimensions:
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 378 x 288 mm
Image Dimensions Height/Width (Height x Width): 14 7/8 x 11 5/16 in
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 535 x 415 mm
Sheet/Paper Dimensions (Height x Width): 21 1/16 x 16 5/16 in
Mat Dimensions (Height x Width): 25 x 20 in

Credit line: Gift of the Print Society of Greater Kansas City

Accession number: 2020.0014

On display: Simons Gallery

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Images

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Soundings: Making Culture at Sea

This complex print by Osage artist Norman Akers combines maps and a seascape with other images of European colonialism. He depicts George Washington and Alexander Hamilton—founding statesmen who shaped US policies on land and at sea—as aliens descending on Indigenous land. While Akers’s work tends to focus on territorial borders, this work also visualizes the role of the sea in colonial narratives.

Spencer Museum of Art Highlights

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.