Painter Norman Akers will present the Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture on Thursday, April 24 at 5:30 p.m. at Sheldon Museum of Art’s Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.
The School of Art, Art History & Design’s Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist & Scholar Lecture Series brings notable artists, scholars and designers to Nebraska each semester to enhance the education of students. The series is presented in collaboration with Sheldon Museum of Art.
Akers’ work is included in the spring exhibition “Exploding Native Inevitable” at Sheldon Museum of Art. He is an associate professor in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas.
As a Native American artist, he explores issues of identity, culture (including Osage mythos), place, and the dynamics of personal and cultural transformation in his work.
Born and raised in Fairfax, Oklahoma, Akers is a member of the Osage Nation. He received his BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and a certificate in museum studies from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He received his MFA in fine arts from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
He has had solo exhibitions at the Lawrence Arts Center (Kansas), Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago and the Gardner Art Gallery at Oklahoma State University. His paintings are in several collections, including the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York; Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona; and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, among others.
In 2007, Akers was selected to participate in the “We Are All Knots” print project, sponsored by the National Museum of the American Indian and ART in the Embassies Program Print Series. He was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant in 1999.
View his work at https://normanakers.com.
Underwritten by the Hixson-Lied Endowment with additional support from other sources, the series enriches the culture of the state by providing a way for Nebraskans to interact with luminaries in the fields of art, art history and design. Each visiting artist or scholar spends one to three days on campus to meet with classes, participate in critiques and give demonstrations.
For more information on the series, contact the School of Art, Art History & Design at (402) 472-5522 or e-mail schoolaahd@unl.edu.