Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist: Norman Akers

Mike Kamm Author

04/25/2025 Added

5 Plays

Description

Norman Akers is associate professor 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. 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.

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[00:00:00.000]-
[00:00:05.000]- Tonight's presenter is Norman Akers,
[00:00:08.040]whose paintings and collages appear in the exhibition
[00:00:11.440]Exploding Native Inevitable,
[00:00:13.600]on view upstairs through July 13th.
[00:00:17.640]As a Native American artist,
[00:00:19.120]he explores issues of identity, culture,
[00:00:22.440]including Osage mythos, place, and the dynamics
[00:00:26.200]of personal and cultural transformation in his work.
[00:00:30.720]Born and raised in Fairfax, Oklahoma,
[00:00:33.700]Akers is a member of the Osage Nation.
[00:00:36.480]He received his BFA in painting
[00:00:38.840]from the Kansas City Art Institute,
[00:00:41.400]a certificate in museum studies
[00:00:44.100]from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe,
[00:00:48.400]and an MFA in fine arts
[00:00:50.580]from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
[00:00:54.900]He has had
[00:00:55.860]solo shows and exhibitions
[00:00:59.160]at the Albrecht Kemper Museum of Art,
[00:01:03.920]Lawrence Arts Center,
[00:01:06.020]Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago,
[00:01:09.320]the Gardner Art Gallery at Oklahoma State University,
[00:01:13.280]and numerous other galleries and exhibition spaces.
[00:01:17.660]His paintings are in several collections,
[00:01:19.880]including the Bates College Museum of Art,
[00:01:23.720]which is the painting that is
[00:01:25.520]on view in this exhibition,
[00:01:27.780]the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City,
[00:01:32.300]the Minneapolis Museum of Art,
[00:01:34.600]Wichita Art Museum, the Heard Museum in Phoenix,
[00:01:39.160]and the Denver Art Museum, to name a few.
[00:01:42.960]He is an associate professor in the Department of Visual Art
[00:01:46.760]and an affiliate faculty in the Indigenous Studies program
[00:01:50.900]at the University of Kansas,
[00:01:53.000]and he is currently in the throes
[00:01:55.180]of a five-month residency at Temple University
[00:01:59.200]as the inaugural Edgar Heap of Birds Family Artist
[00:02:03.160]in Residence.
[00:02:04.780]Please join me in welcoming Norman Akers.
[00:02:08.040]Good evening, and I just want to thank the University
[00:02:17.940]of Nebraska and the Sheldon Museum of Art
[00:02:20.620]for inviting me here to speak and share
[00:02:24.840]a little bit about my work.
[00:02:27.820]I'll talk a little bit more about my kind of background
[00:02:32.360]and upbringing.
[00:02:33.580]And over the course of this talk,
[00:02:35.620]I want to share information about how I sort of construct
[00:02:38.780]and make my work.
[00:02:41.100]As Randy mentioned, I was born and raised
[00:02:43.360]in Fairfax, Oklahoma.
[00:02:45.020]I'm a member of the Osage tribe.
[00:02:48.080]My father was Osage.
[00:02:50.120]My mother was Anglo, and so I'm mixed.
[00:02:54.500]And mixed blood.
[00:02:56.540]And I utilize that experience in much of my work.
[00:03:01.120]This first image that you see is a photograph
[00:03:05.780]of the tall grass prairie and the Flint Hills.
[00:03:09.400]And this is right on the border of Oklahoma and Kansas.
[00:03:14.500]And one of the things I'll sort of share with you is that
[00:03:19.220]I have this deep connection to place, and to me,
[00:03:24.160]this is what I call home.
[00:03:27.200]And it's funny, as I picked this image, I realized I chose
[00:03:30.380]an image with nothing but grass and hills.
[00:03:34.720]And in some ways, it's almost a romanticized image of home,
[00:03:39.420]you know, with this kind of absence of people.
[00:03:43.360]But again, this is a place that I look at as home.
[00:03:50.960]One of the things I'll share with you,
[00:03:53.820]also I want to talk a little bit about some of the,
[00:03:58.480]and kind of acknowledge some of the people from home.
[00:04:03.220]Being Osage from Gray Horse District,
[00:04:06.360]one of the things that we always talk about is that our ancestors
[00:04:10.020]and our people before us put things in order
[00:04:13.720]for us to live a good life.
[00:04:16.520]And when I was a very young child, my grandma Eva,
[00:04:22.480]and you see these three images.
[00:04:23.480]These three people here, that's grandma Eva
[00:04:27.780]and her sister Mary and Josephine.
[00:04:31.620]And grandma Eva, I was sort of fortunate enough to be
[00:04:34.820]around when I was a young child.
[00:04:37.040]And she was the one who put things in order for me
[00:04:41.320]to have a good life at home.
[00:04:44.920]And I always like to kind of acknowledge her, you know,
[00:04:50.340]whenever I'm doing a talk.
[00:04:53.140]Some of the things that have always kind
[00:04:55.500]of fascinated me is maps.
[00:04:59.840]And I've worked a lot with cartography in the past.
[00:05:03.800]And what we have are two maps from home.
[00:05:08.580]One is a map of, and I'm going to use the word here
[00:05:12.540]on the map, Osage County from the 1920s.
[00:05:18.000]And if you look at that map, what you realize is that you see
[00:05:22.800]the railroad, you see rivers and streams,
[00:05:27.200]and that's the primary importance.
[00:05:32.000]But also there's three, those three red dots, you see Pasuli,
[00:05:36.400]Huacoccoli, and Zanzoli.
[00:05:39.100]Basically, Hominy, Pawhuska, and Gray Horse.
[00:05:43.040]Gray Horse is the district from where I come from.
[00:05:46.000]One thing about Osage is we identify by these districts,
[00:05:50.560]you know, whether you're from one of those.
[00:05:52.460]And so this map has always kind of caught my attention.
[00:05:56.240]And then I contrast it with another map from the 1990s.
[00:06:02.000]And what we see is a map of home where we see this overlay
[00:06:07.380]of roads, reservoirs, and kind of new place names.
[00:06:12.480]And you'll see how the maps begin to work
[00:06:15.700]out in my paintings as I talk a little bit later.
[00:06:22.120]It's funny because I have always had a fascination with maps.
[00:06:27.240]When I was a little kid, I collected them.
[00:06:30.820]And growing up in a small community of about 1300 people,
[00:06:35.940]people would bring me maps, paper maps, and I would unfold them
[00:06:39.440]on the floor and I would look at them and I would imagine places.
[00:06:44.120]And that was, you know, something that --
[00:06:48.220]it was funny as I -- when I first introduced the maps
[00:06:51.360]into my work.
[00:06:51.780]I kept on thinking, where did this come from?
[00:06:54.920]I realized this was something
[00:06:56.360]that has been a childhood interest for many, many years.
[00:07:00.460]And so, anyway, we have these.
[00:07:04.820]This is also another image that I --
[00:07:09.600]that comes from the border of Kansas and Oklahoma.
[00:07:13.960]You know, I teach at the University of Illinois --
[00:07:16.400]I mean, University of Kansas .
[00:07:19.900]And one of the things
[00:07:21.440]about being a tribal member is that it's important
[00:07:27.380]to really have connections to the community where I'm from.
[00:07:33.380]So, to say I'm Osage also means that I have
[00:07:36.460]to be an active part of that community.
[00:07:38.720]And there has to be ways that I can contribute, you know,
[00:07:42.800]to the well-being of home.
[00:07:47.000]And so, I find that I actually make anywhere from two
[00:07:50.500]to three trips.
[00:07:51.100]I mean, I make three trips a month back to Oklahoma from KU.
[00:07:55.040]And one of the things I do is I travel
[00:07:57.480]on this two-lane road, Highway 99.
[00:08:03.620]And I'm traveling across the Flint Hills
[00:08:07.860]and the tall grass prairie, keeping in mind
[00:08:11.260]that Osage land was Missouri, southeast Kansas,
[00:08:18.160]northeast Oklahoma.
[00:08:20.760]And so, traveling across ancestral land has always been
[00:08:24.360]important to me.
[00:08:25.940]And just the fact that it's kind of a -- how would I say it?
[00:08:30.040]I always think of Highway 99 as being like an umbilical cord,
[00:08:34.280]that it's taking me home.
[00:08:38.180]But there's also something that happens.
[00:08:40.220]When I get close to that border, what I see is signage.
[00:08:46.020]And, you know, I don't know if you've heard of signage.
[00:08:50.420]You know, you see a sign that says,
[00:08:52.720]"Leaving Kansas, come again."
[00:08:55.900]And there's a sort of awareness
[00:08:57.620]that our last reservation was the Osage Diminished Reserve
[00:09:01.440]in Kansas, and right after the Civil War,
[00:09:04.000]we were moved to Oklahoma.
[00:09:08.000]You see another sign that says, "Welcome to Oklahoma."
[00:09:12.580]You see another sign that says,
[00:09:13.840]"You are entering the Osage Nation Reservation."
[00:09:17.540]And also, "Welcome to Osage County."
[00:09:20.080]And what I become really aware of is this notion
[00:09:25.080]that people are trying to define a place that we call home,
[00:09:30.080]and you sort of see the history of colonialism happen,
[00:09:34.200]you know, at this point.
[00:09:36.160]That first image that I showed you, you know,
[00:09:39.160]what I like about it is that there's no signage.
[00:09:42.160]There's nothing.
[00:09:43.160]There's no marker that says, "Kansas, Oklahoma."
[00:09:46.160]It's seamless grassland, and so,
[00:09:49.740]so that sense of home exists beyond these borders
[00:09:52.740]and boundaries that are sort of in place.
[00:09:56.740]You know, I've always thought that cartographers
[00:09:59.740]have done more damage to Indian land than anybody.
[00:10:02.740]Through the process of mapping our homelands,
[00:10:06.740]they've kind of displaced us from home,
[00:10:10.740]and they've also isolated us in a certain place.
[00:10:13.740]And so these are, you know, some of the things
[00:10:17.740]that I'm kind of thinking of,
[00:10:19.400]thinking about when I'm working.
[00:10:23.400]Just something that recently happened about a year ago,
[00:10:26.400]the Department of Transportation had us
[00:10:29.400]take down our Osage Nation signs,
[00:10:32.400]that we had to kind of create uniform signs.
[00:10:35.400]They still haven't been replaced yet.
[00:10:38.400]I'm not for sure where that goes,
[00:10:40.400]but I had an issue with the fact
[00:10:42.400]that we couldn't define land on our own terms,
[00:10:45.400]even with our own signage.
[00:10:47.400]And so they were kind of
[00:10:49.060]looking at maybe these brown or these green signs,
[00:10:53.060]and I object to brown
[00:10:55.060]because it really talks about historical sites.
[00:10:59.060]And we're not historical.
[00:11:01.060]We're living, and we're still here today.
[00:11:05.060]I want to move on to a few other things here.
[00:11:07.060]I do a lot of work with symbols,
[00:11:11.060]and I've worked for the last 30 years, 35 years,
[00:11:17.060]developing a personal idea
[00:11:18.720]and a personal iconography that I draw from.
[00:11:21.380]These images that are symbols
[00:11:24.380]come from a lot of different sources.
[00:11:26.380]I look at things from home.
[00:11:29.380]I look at popular culture.
[00:11:31.380]I look at art history.
[00:11:33.380]And what you see here is kind of a collection
[00:11:37.380]of images of, like, flying saucers.
[00:11:42.380]You see nets.
[00:11:44.380]You see the elk.
[00:11:46.380]You see lunch boxes.
[00:11:48.380]Like I said, this is kind of my visual vocabulary.
[00:11:52.380]One of the things I'm fascinated with symbols
[00:11:57.380]is the fact that they don't have one meaning.
[00:12:00.380]Like, a stop sign simply means stop.
[00:12:04.380]But how I approach working with symbols,
[00:12:08.380]particularly over a period of time,
[00:12:10.380]is that if the symbol is evolving,
[00:12:14.380]as I sort of evolve as a person,
[00:12:18.040]and I see that kind of life that's in the symbol change and move,
[00:12:24.040]then it stays with me.
[00:12:26.040]There's times where I've worked and introduced new images into the work,
[00:12:30.040]and they've stayed for a little while,
[00:12:32.040]and then I finally dropped them off.
[00:12:34.040]They didn't mean that much for me.
[00:12:36.040]So I'm really intrigued with the fact that basically they kind of evolve.
[00:12:47.700]This is another image.
[00:12:49.700]When I went to the University of Illinois,
[00:12:53.700]I was recruited with two other Native students.
[00:12:57.700]One student left immediately, and the two of us stayed.
[00:13:02.700]And I have to say a little bit more about my history.
[00:13:08.700]I was a plein air landscape painter for many years.
[00:13:11.700]I painted landscapes in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and that's what I did.
[00:13:17.360]And I got to a certain point where what happened was that painting landscapes kind of wasn't fulfilling me.
[00:13:27.360]And they were kind of documents of my wandering around the country.
[00:13:35.360]And so I'll share one story with you.
[00:13:39.360]And I said this earlier today, I was doing Indian Market in Santa Fe.
[00:13:45.360]And I had these paintings.
[00:13:47.020]These paintings of home.
[00:13:50.020]And if any of you are familiar with Market, there was people gathered right at daylight when artists are setting up their booths.
[00:13:59.020]And someone came and they bought one of my paintings from Oklahoma.
[00:14:04.020]And it was, you know, I was pleased with the sale.
[00:14:08.020]But as they were walking away, I thought, oh, they got a prize.
[00:14:13.020]And I started thinking about it.
[00:14:15.020]I'm selling pictures of home.
[00:14:16.680]And it felt like, you know, I was losing a piece of land.
[00:14:23.680]And I thought, oh, right at that same time, I got an offer to go to graduate school.
[00:14:29.680]And I swore I would never paint another landscape again because of that.
[00:14:36.680]And needless to say, within a semester, I was painting landscapes.
[00:14:41.680]But what I had found was is that I wasn't painting landscapes.
[00:14:46.340]I wasn't painting these external landscapes, I was painting internal.
[00:14:51.340]My feelings about place.
[00:14:54.340]And all of a sudden, that was a dramatic moment for me, you know, in my art.
[00:15:00.340]Also, I think as an artist and being in graduate school, I started doing a lot more research.
[00:15:07.340]And I'm really fascinated with where culture information comes from.
[00:15:12.340]And I think of a number of different sources.
[00:15:16.000]One is clearly the experience of being at home, of listening to people make expressions
[00:15:25.000]while growing up, that there's this oral history that I want to draw from in my work.
[00:15:32.000]But also as a researcher, you know, I started looking at the history of the Osage people.
[00:15:39.000]And some people that I was looking at was an Omaha man named Francis La Flesche.
[00:15:45.660]Who, in the 1900s, he came down to Oklahoma and started doing ethnographic research.
[00:15:55.660]And he amassed an incredible amount of writings on our tribe.
[00:16:02.660]And I began, as I said, kind of studying them.
[00:16:07.660]And what I found was that many of the things that he recorded, they were so beautiful in the sense that
[00:16:15.320]they were poetic, but they also created these rich kind of visual images.
[00:16:22.320]There were other ethnographers, like Dorsey, that I looked at.
[00:16:28.320]I remember going down to the Stax, the big library at U of I.
[00:16:33.320]And I was going through these Bureau of Ethnology reports, and I came across this diagram.
[00:16:39.320]And it was of the Osage universe.
[00:16:44.980]I was mystified by it. First of all, it was a connection to who I was, but I didn't really understand it.
[00:16:51.980]You have to keep in mind, my Grandma Eva, I would go to Mass with her.
[00:16:56.980]But we would also go to the Native American church when I was really young.
[00:17:01.980]And so I had this kind of experience, but really knowing Osage creation stories was not a part of my growing up.
[00:17:10.980]You know, what I've always found is that cultural information
[00:17:14.640]and that experience is that you're put in a place.
[00:17:18.640]Your family puts things in order so you can learn, but you slowly learn about culture.
[00:17:25.640]That it's an ongoing process as you live.
[00:17:28.640]What I found interesting about that diagram was that I realized that if my grandma Eva looked at it,
[00:17:35.640]and my father looked at it, and I was looking at it, that each of us would have this deep connection to it.
[00:17:44.300]But we would see it a little bit differently because of the context of our time and our experiences.
[00:17:51.800]And so I wanted to make a painting of it, but I realized I couldn't particularly illustrate it.
[00:17:57.800]And so this is what I ended up with, was a painting called "Collision of Heavenly Structures."
[00:18:04.800]And this is a fairly large painting, about a little bit bigger than the painting that's in the gallery in the museum.
[00:18:13.960]And so what you see, really, is kind of this tree, the red oak tree.
[00:18:20.720]You see these sort of boxes for the world, the cedar tree, the sun and the moon, and you get this kind of conflict that's going on.
[00:18:31.720]There's almost like a Picasso-esque angel form in there, as well, and to me, the painting really expressed
[00:18:43.620]something that I was dealing with at the moment. Being in Illinois, I was feeling very disconnected from home,
[00:18:51.960]and so the painting was very, what I would say, kind of angst-driven, you might say, and it was funny at that time,
[00:19:00.780]the other person who was at U of I was Charlene Teeters, who has definitely did a lot of activism,
[00:19:07.860]and we would always talk about things, and I made a comment, I said, "You know, I'm not a political
[00:19:13.280]painter." And she went, "Oh, yes, you are." And I kept on looking at this painting, and I'm realizing,
[00:19:22.280]"Oh, yes, I am." And it's funny, I mean, I think, how would I say it, as a native person, if you make
[00:19:33.080]work about land and the landscape, it's political, because you're dealing with that history. And
[00:19:42.940]as an artist, I would sort of say, I'm not a person who's loud. I'm not going to scream at someone to try to get my point across.
[00:19:54.200]I like to make work that engages people in looking, and then somewhere in the process, what happens is that the work
[00:20:05.040]unfolds, and they start to see what the issues are about. I think today we're so polarized.
[00:20:12.600]In many cases, that we can't agree on things. So I like the notion of making works that draw people in, and maybe are slightly subversive.
[00:20:23.940]In the sense that all of a sudden, they see and go, "Oh, this is what this is about." But at least they've been engaged in this conversation with the work.
[00:20:32.760]I'm going to go back to another piece. I tend to work -- this is a painting called "Sorting
[00:20:42.260]Out Blind Sensations." This was after graduate school, and I went back to Oklahoma and was
[00:20:50.400]working in a studio there. One of the things about the prairie that's always caught my
[00:20:55.700]attention is that when you're dealing with that expanse of land, there's things that
[00:21:04.400]exist beyond your eyesight. When you're looking at the horizon, as a
[00:21:11.920]said, there's things you can't see. If you've ever waded through tall grass, there's things
[00:21:16.300]around you that you can't see. The notion of the invisible world has always been a part
[00:21:25.580]of my thinking when I'm painting. Also, I deal a lot with narrative and this kind of
[00:21:33.700]storytelling. You see this image here sitting on the prairie. They have no eyes, but they're
[00:21:41.580]carrying a pair of binoculars that are supposed to help them see, which are kind of useless,
[00:21:47.000]but the hand reaching out is kind of acknowledging that something's there.
[00:21:51.840]You see this image of this kind of archetype of a human being. I'll talk a little bit about
[00:22:03.020]that in the sense that you see petroglyphs or pictographs sometimes with that shape.
[00:22:11.240]Also, kind of doorways, you know, but I think about the notion of passages and movement from
[00:22:18.140]one place to another. And this painting, of course, there's a cedar tree. If you look in
[00:22:26.020]the far background on the horizon, there's a radio telescope. You see kind of the dove,
[00:22:32.780]the sun, a tornado, you know, and that. And so really was kind of constructing these kind of
[00:22:40.900]narrative scapes. I tend to work, and one of the things I'll sort of say when I was in art school,
[00:22:47.200]I remembered I always wanted to be an abstract painter because I saw that as being contemporary.
[00:22:52.020]And I couldn't figure out how to be one, you know, and I finally realized that abstraction
[00:22:57.520]is really hard. And so I found that I've always kind of fluctuated between expressive painting
[00:23:05.420]and also representational, you know, painting as well. And so,
[00:23:10.560]so, so this is probably one of the few paintings that I've ever done a figure in.
[00:23:17.860]And this is another piece called "I Hope You Got There."
[00:23:24.700]And what you see is that I'm revisiting that tree, that kind of creation story.
[00:23:32.280]Or you see the red oak tree, see the cedar tree and the red bird, but also, you know, there's
[00:23:40.220]a reference to a tragic event, you know, here.
[00:23:44.620]My father had a T-bird, and I could remember when I was a little less riding around on
[00:23:49.120]the prairie.
[00:23:51.020]And unfortunately, my father passed with a very sort of bad incident.
[00:23:57.700]And I remembered I was trying to process that and trying to figure out how do I make a painting
[00:24:02.480]about it.
[00:24:04.020]And every time I made a painting, it just didn't work.
[00:24:07.000]And then one time I remembered, he would always look, he said, "You know, I hope you got
[00:24:09.880]there."
[00:24:10.880]And I said, "No, I hope I get to that place sometime."
[00:24:13.320]And that's what I did.
[00:24:14.320]When I was making this painting, I was thinking about that T-Bird and traveling, and I was
[00:24:19.840]thinking about this kind of creation story, our universe, and I was going, "Oh, I hope
[00:24:26.440]you got there."
[00:24:28.240]And this kind of put that at ease and put that in place.
[00:24:36.420]This is also a piece called "Okisa."
[00:24:39.540]I'm going to also use another word, "Okise."
[00:24:44.760]This painting here was one of the first paintings that I had started using the map.
[00:24:50.160]You see that red oak tree, that trunk, and that's one of the symbols I've been using
[00:24:56.020]for many years, but it's floating kind of in between places here.
[00:25:02.460]It's somewhere between earth and sky, and I think amongst Osages, we think about earth
[00:25:06.620]and sky very much.
[00:25:09.200]As a person that I realize professionally, I have to be away from home, so I'm constantly
[00:25:21.800]going back and forth between where I work and home, so I always feel like I'm in between
[00:25:28.160]places, and you sort of see this tree trunk sort of sitting in between places, and I always
[00:25:37.360]think about the notion of traveling.
[00:25:38.860]And so this was a work that came about from that.
[00:25:50.240]This is a painting titled "Balancing Act," and I think duality has always been a part
[00:25:57.720]of my work.
[00:25:59.960]The notion of, and I'm kind of going back to this concept like Osage, earth and sky,
[00:26:06.900]but also light and dark.
[00:26:08.520]The fact that my father was Osage, my mother was Anglo, and this piece I think really does
[00:26:16.320]kind of, it's the landscape, it's both external, it's also internal.
[00:26:21.840]You see images of megaphones, you see the Jarvik 7 heart that I was using in the past,
[00:26:29.020]and light and dark, and really, as I said, kind of working with a very sort of expressive
[00:26:38.180]kind of paint process.
[00:26:42.240]This is another piece called Eustace's New Suit, and this was done actually right at
[00:26:50.860]the time, and kind of before we had casinos in Oklahoma, and I remembered I was lucky
[00:26:56.960]that I was able to travel to Paris when I was in graduate school, and I saw a relief
[00:27:04.080]sculpture of a stag's head with a crucifix.
[00:27:07.840]And I was fascinated with it, and I realized it was a symbol of St. Eustace, or St. Hubert.
[00:27:14.340]And so I thought, I'm going to use that, because St. Eustace was the patron saint of hunters.
[00:27:23.440]And I started thinking about Osages as being a hunting culture, and how Catholicism's influence
[00:27:31.360]on us today.
[00:27:33.380]And so I ended up doing this piece.
[00:27:37.500]I ended up putting a drum in there, and one of the things I'll share with you, too, is
[00:27:43.740]I've been a part of Ilonshka ever since I was a little kid.
[00:27:48.020]And when we talk about that drum, we address it as grandfather.
[00:27:53.340]And I remembered making this painting, and I started feeling kind of not good about the
[00:27:58.120]fact that it was torn, it was cut, it was broken, in a sense.
[00:28:03.620]And if you look closely, you know, you see that artificial heart.
[00:28:07.160]You see these arrows laying on the ground.
[00:28:10.880]You see these kind of fireballs and that, and there's actually a picture of Shakopee
[00:28:16.380]Casino in one of the corners.
[00:28:21.080]And I really think of this painting as kind of a warning painting.
[00:28:25.120]And one of the things I will sort of say is that the gaming industry has been really good
[00:28:32.060]for tribes.
[00:28:33.180]It's helped us do many things that we couldn't do in the past.
[00:28:36.820]But also, you know, what I found kind of disturbing to me was I remembered going to Gray Horse
[00:28:44.220]and sitting with family and we would eat and we would drink coffee until way late in the
[00:28:48.960]night and we would just talk at the dinner table.
[00:28:52.780]And then when casinos started popping up, all of a sudden it was like after dinner and
[00:28:57.080]said let's hop in the vehicle and let's go and go to the casino.
[00:29:01.740]And there was something about plugging in that was really kind of disturbing to me.
[00:29:06.480]But as I said, this was a work that kind of played off of that.
[00:29:17.240]Another thing that happens, I've taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and
[00:29:21.500]my training at the Kansas City Art Institute was very Eurocentric.
[00:29:27.480]You know, I went through this incredible foundations program, you know, kind of learned to paint
[00:29:32.100]traditionally, you know, in a sense.
[00:29:36.140]And I started kind of thinking a little bit about, you know, why am I teaching this at
[00:29:42.120]the Institute of American Indian Arts?
[00:29:44.540]And I started kind of looking at that and I ended up doing this painting and this is
[00:29:51.700]just called Sacred Structures.
[00:29:54.620]And I made this painting of this cathedral and we're dealing with this kind of perspective
[00:30:01.540]type space and then once that was done.
[00:30:05.800]And I started superimposing some of the iconography that I had been working with, these kind of
[00:30:10.760]flat symbols as well as diagramic symbols.
[00:30:16.660]And I've always kind of associated perspective with Western painting.
[00:30:23.340]You think about the Renaissance, you think about creating the illusion of space.
[00:30:30.220]And I was going, "Well, why is that important?"
[00:30:34.320]And then I was...
[00:30:35.460]I remembered at that time I was looking at these catalogs from Primitivism of the Twentieth
[00:30:40.480]Century by William Rubin and Kurt Vando, and how African art, for instance, and indigenous
[00:30:54.020]arts informed modernism.
[00:30:57.000]I was going, "Wait a second.
[00:30:58.180]We've been doing that for a long, long time," and so kind of juxtaposing these two
[00:31:05.120]different types of visual space in a painting was important to me with this.
[00:31:11.780]Also, it was funny because I kept on finding people would look at my paintings and they
[00:31:16.760]would talk about the color and say, "Oh, that's a really nice color."
[00:31:21.260]And so what I found was I began working with a limited palette to kind of shift the conversation.
[00:31:29.240]This is another piece called "Listening for a Murmur."
[00:31:34.780]It's of midtown Manhattan, and I superimposed an image of the Dutch colonizing the Mauritius Islands.
[00:31:46.360]If you look closely, they're decimating the wildlife there, and it was kind of an eco-terrorism.
[00:31:53.960]I also kept on thinking about the myth in New York about the Dutch buying Manhattan, and that kind of colonialism.
[00:32:04.440]So this was kind of a time when I was beginning to play with historical prints.
[00:32:10.680]The stethoscope was one of those images that I've only used it in this one painting,
[00:32:15.640]but the notion of like listening for something that's not kind of invisible or not heard.
[00:32:22.680]This is a piece called "Power Chords to the Past," and you know,
[00:32:34.100]I think of myself as a painter first.
[00:32:37.140]You know, I love working with material, and paintings generally take three to sometimes
[00:32:45.880]months to even a year to paint.
[00:32:48.500]This painting was plaguing me, and it was in the studio, and I was like, I couldn't
[00:32:53.740]figure out how to finish it.
[00:32:56.280]And I kept on thinking, what sort of image can I put in?
[00:32:59.540]And the bottom part of the painting was just driving me crazy.
[00:33:03.760]I had this extension cord that was laying on the ground,
[00:33:07.480]and I kept on kicking it.
[00:33:08.840]I was kind of too lazy to pick it up and move it.
[00:33:12.160]And one day, I looked at it, and it had this beautiful arc.
[00:33:17.900]And I made a quick drawing of it, and I put it in there,
[00:33:20.620]and I went, ah, the painting is done.
[00:33:24.700]And what was funny is I started thinking
[00:33:27.280]about the elk bellowing, the elk calling,
[00:33:32.260]this transference of energy.
[00:33:33.420]You know, that's what an extension cord is.
[00:33:37.200]It's, it helps with this transference of energy.
[00:33:41.200]Also, weather sirens.
[00:33:42.600]I mean, you're in Nebraska, I mean, you know, from Oklahoma,
[00:33:45.920]we know good and well about tornadoes.
[00:33:49.180]And so, so, so this was, this was kind of a, a work that kind
[00:33:55.460]of came about out of that.
[00:33:57.780]I'm also going to talk a little bit,
[00:34:01.140]and going to shift a little bit to,
[00:34:03.080]to another sort of source for my work.
[00:34:06.380]I do a lot of printmaking.
[00:34:08.180]And, and, and I actually did glass work
[00:34:12.900]at the University of Illinois.
[00:34:15.420]And, and transparency
[00:34:17.980]and layering has always been an important part of my work.
[00:34:21.920]And it's a strategy that I utilize
[00:34:24.720]to do a number of things.
[00:34:26.540]One is it creates a sense of time.
[00:34:31.760]I think about the notion
[00:34:33.000]of past, present, and future.
[00:34:36.480]The layering also kind of compresses the visual space.
[00:34:41.020]But it also sometimes, you know, creates kind of a,
[00:34:44.920]kind of a space that has a certain depth to it.
[00:34:47.960]And, and I'm interested very much
[00:34:50.480]in the positioning of things.
[00:34:53.300]This monoprint that you're looking at, New Story,
[00:34:56.420]I was doing a lot of monoprints at one time.
[00:35:02.160]And what I always found
[00:35:02.920]was that first impression was never satisfying.
[00:35:08.600]There was something about when you ink up a plate
[00:35:13.000]and would pull that print and look at it and go,
[00:35:15.640]eh, this is not working.
[00:35:18.260]And then what I found was is that the residue
[00:35:24.900]of ink was intriguing to me.
[00:35:29.140]And then I started cutting out these stencils
[00:35:31.240]of the elk, the crawdad.
[00:35:32.840]And started inking them up and then dropping them
[00:35:36.820]on the plate and then printing.
[00:35:39.020]And what I started realizing, that's the past
[00:35:41.320]and the present meeting.
[00:35:44.120]You know, at home we talk a little bit sometimes.
[00:35:46.920]We talk about the residue of things.
[00:35:48.780]That residue gathers at a certain point.
[00:35:52.620]And so, this print kind of began to do that.
[00:35:57.860]Also, when I was doing the glass work,
[00:36:00.140]I was hot working these components.
[00:36:02.760]And when you start casting them in the glass,
[00:36:04.960]I remember the first time I could pick up a form
[00:36:07.300]and I moved it like this.
[00:36:09.440]And I could start to look
[00:36:10.500]at the relationship three-dimensionally.
[00:36:13.500]That it was just marvelous.
[00:36:15.240]And so, that's very much, you know, a few things that kind
[00:36:20.640]of sort how, you know, inform the work that I'm doing today.
[00:36:26.480]This is a painting, "Okitse" is an Osage word.
[00:36:32.680]And it simply means "halfway," you know.
[00:36:38.240]And it's also a town in Oklahoma, Okitse,
[00:36:43.760]which is halfway in between Pawhuska and Bartlesville.
[00:36:48.060]I like that word because it says something
[00:36:51.120]about who I am being in between places.
[00:36:55.320]This was a painting that I started to incorporate a number
[00:37:00.100]of different things.
[00:37:01.400]One, I drew--
[00:37:02.600]on my landscape painting tradition, a plein air painting,
[00:37:06.440]we see a physical representation of our home.
[00:37:11.900]You also see a map.
[00:37:15.240]And that map is really kind of a document of colonialism.
[00:37:20.060]And you see the elk.
[00:37:21.440]And the elk, I've been using a lot in my work
[00:37:24.360]because it comes from one of our stories
[00:37:26.420]about the formation of land, dry land for us to live on.
[00:37:30.900]It's a fairly long elaboration.
[00:37:32.520]It's a short story.
[00:37:33.420]And I'll just kind of leave it a little bit about that.
[00:37:36.040]But basically, in the struggle, when the elk throws itself down
[00:37:41.340]into the water, the water disperses.
[00:37:44.700]And that gave us land to live on.
[00:37:48.820]But also, the different parts of the elk
[00:37:51.140]were symbolic of different physical aspects of land.
[00:37:54.700]The antlers were rivers and streams.
[00:37:59.540]In that struggle, the hair got--
[00:38:02.440]got mixed in with the mud, and that became grass.
[00:38:06.940]And that-- and so what I like about this painting
[00:38:09.460]is that there's these three elements of Osage history
[00:38:13.780]that come together.
[00:38:15.160]And that it really is very much a painting that's
[00:38:19.760]about an Osage sense of place.
[00:38:21.640]And I think one of the things that when
[00:38:23.420]we talk about the notion of land back is that as tribes
[00:38:29.340]are sort of working to--
[00:38:32.360]to reclaim and get more land that's been lost,
[00:38:36.920]there's also, I think, the notion
[00:38:38.460]of us being able to define the land that we live on,
[00:38:43.360]on our own terms.
[00:38:44.540]And that's why when I showed those images of those signs,
[00:38:49.340]we see that signage.
[00:38:50.540]And we realize that there's so many political entities trying
[00:38:53.720]to define a place we call home.
[00:38:56.860]And so this painting--
[00:38:59.000]to me feels like it's very much an Osage, you know, work that's about our land.
[00:39:07.000]These are a few other images that I've been working with called "Dripping World."
[00:39:12.560]Dealing a little bit more with environmental issues, clearly kind of
[00:39:18.560]global warming. Those red dots and gray dots, they were sort of microscopic
[00:39:26.540]images of water. And looking at that, that globe that I started painted
[00:39:34.400]where it's dripping, you know, too, it also is a little bit more about the
[00:39:40.520]flexibility of borders and boundaries. And I'm working with that.
[00:39:49.060]This is a painting called "Interference and a Tiny Spot of Hope."
[00:39:56.120]And, and again it's, it's a work that I'm really kind of playing with the notion
[00:40:06.800]of kind of chaos and things being sort of disordered. You see the elk flipped
[00:40:13.460]upside down. And, and, and yeah. This is a piece called "Drowning Elk."
[00:40:25.700]And it's actually at the Zimmerle Museum in New Brunswick. And, and this was a
[00:40:32.300]painting that was done during COVID. And I was kind of fascinated. I found that
[00:40:37.040]COVID was that experience. I happened to be on sabbatical at that time. And it
[00:40:44.420]threw all my plans off. But I think as a painter, one of the things that is
[00:40:49.760]important to kind of know is painting is a very lonely activity. You know, I tend
[00:40:55.280]to like the quiet time of working. And I actually kind of thrived on COVID. There
[00:41:01.640]was something about and I understand it clearly that it created a lot of tragedy
[00:41:06.200]for people. But the notion of having like this kind of time just to work was
[00:41:13.640]important. But also the notion of uncertainty. You know, and I find as an
[00:41:19.100]artist that even though I'm dealing with this vocabulary of images that I draw
[00:41:24.860]from, what I'm intrigued most is when they come together in a way that I don't
[00:41:31.280]understand them. And I like that notion of not knowing. And this was one of those
[00:41:37.120]paintings when it came about, I'm still, I wasn't for sure what I did, but I
[00:41:44.180]felt, my gut level felt like, oh this is a good painting.
[00:41:49.060]And it was funny because I was at home and I was buying bottled water from
[00:41:54.440]the dollar store and I kept on buying and I was just looking at this
[00:41:59.660]accumulation of plastic that was happening in the house and part of it
[00:42:04.640]was is that when I started drinking the tap water from home I realized it tastes
[00:42:08.720]bad. It wasn't like the water I drank when I was a kid and and so you know I
[00:42:17.400]ended up crushing these water bottles and and including them you know in my
[00:42:23.240]paintings.
[00:42:24.020]I've been at this residency in Philadelphia and and I told the the
[00:42:38.120]people at Tyler I said I said the first thing I'm going to do is make a painting
[00:42:41.760]about the Liberty Bell and I remember the first week I went down and I looked
[00:42:47.540]at the Liberty Bell and I went to Constitutional Hall and how would I
[00:42:53.960]say it I'll just say it I wasn't really impressed I took a lot of photographs
[00:43:01.280]and I kept on thinking oh yeah I'm gonna find something to use I went to this
[00:43:07.720]interpretive Center and I saw this this museum
[00:43:13.520]kind of text and display that had a photograph of the Liberty Bell it was an
[00:43:19.480]x-ray kind of photograph of it and I thought wow that's really
[00:43:23.900]neat and I took a snapshot of it took it to the studio and I flipped it upside
[00:43:31.700]down and created this painting here and and it just seemed really appropriate
[00:43:39.380]for the time one of the things that I will sort of share with you too is is
[00:43:46.300]that a lot of the information that I work with from home you know I think
[00:43:52.020]about how that I
[00:43:53.840]I sort of acquired that image over time some of it is stories that I've heard
[00:43:57.900]expressions all I remember particularly with this painting I remember 30 almost
[00:44:06.080]40 years ago
[00:44:07.520]someone getting up one time and saying there's this bird and that's just how
[00:44:12.440]they said it they said there's this bird and it's able to see things that we
[00:44:15.920]can't see and I just loved it at that and I've always that's always stayed
[00:44:21.020]with me and so so I
[00:44:23.780]I've been sort of I ended up making that kind of reference to this bird and I
[00:44:28.680]like kind of superimposing these stories in a way and so that x-ray image that
[00:44:36.680]we're seeing of the bell you know and that bird you know is something that was
[00:44:41.900]was looking at also one of the things that happened is the Delaware people or
[00:44:47.840]the Lenape people were moved all the way from the east to Oklahoma and
[00:44:53.720]they have an agency in Bartlesville just east of where we live and there's
[00:44:59.300]also a group in southern Oklahoma and I started making these connections between
[00:45:04.160]Philadelphia and home and and this was this was the first painting of my
[00:45:11.300]residency this is another piece again you know from the residency I was sort
[00:45:21.840]of did this image of the rising
[00:45:23.660]Sun and there's a story that it talks about I think Ben Franklin looking at
[00:45:31.220]this chair that Washington set in and there was a carved rising Sun on the
[00:45:37.120]back of it and he said he was contemplating about whether it was
[00:45:40.300]rising or setting you know with with what they were doing at the at the hall
[00:45:47.280]and so so that was that was I ended up
[00:45:53.600]kind of bringing that into to the painting and it clearly we see the elk
[00:45:57.320]kind of struggling you know - this was one of the other pieces from from the
[00:46:04.480]residency as well show a couple more images this is a lithograph called an
[00:46:17.180]easy welcome I came across this image called the people
[00:46:23.540]and land which have been discovered and it was a woodcut from around 1503 and it
[00:46:29.760]was in Burke offers book called the white man's Indian and supposedly it was
[00:46:34.940]the first ethnographically correct image of people from the New World and I
[00:46:40.520]was looking at it and I was thinking oh the composition feels very European you
[00:46:47.440]know when you're looking at it you see just how everything's organized you see
[00:46:51.660]the sort of leader figure
[00:46:53.480]you see the mother and child you see this kind of couple engaged and almost a
[00:46:59.220]lustful activity but all the stereotypes of their the feathered headdresses we're
[00:47:06.240]seeing cannibalism and I kept on thinking what was the most important
[00:47:10.040]part of that painting our print and basically it was the two ships in the
[00:47:14.900]background you know and and I realized that those two ships marked a point when
[00:47:21.740]the world changed for people
[00:47:23.420]in the Americas and and so I've been kind of playing with that also I've been
[00:47:31.860]thinking about immigration and I remember being in New Mexico even in
[00:47:38.880]early 2000 where they were talking about creating a wall or a fence and realizing
[00:47:46.200]that that doing that also was like an extension of those borders and boundaries
[00:47:53.360]and the wall basically separated indigenous people from their homeland and the notion of
[00:47:58.160]who's indigenous you know and I am and who's you know and alien and all those
[00:48:07.520]things you know were kind of in my mind so I started thinking about why do people
[00:48:12.620]move why do people leave and most people migrate I mean native peoples have done
[00:48:18.440]this for millennia that we've moved across the prairie to follow food
[00:48:23.300]you know you move because you want to take care of your people you want to
[00:48:28.820]take care of your your family and and I kept on thinking about that and so I
[00:48:36.000]ended up taking these historic figures from our US currency and plugging them
[00:48:43.280]into spaceships and they're floating around looking for a place to land and I
[00:48:49.880]think that's something that the people sometimes who are the most
[00:48:53.240]loudest about about issues of immigration forget that they were also
[00:49:00.740]immigrants too and they left Ireland you know because the potato famine came
[00:49:07.880]here they left England because of religious persecution and they did that
[00:49:14.300]all to make a better life for their family and so so this is my little kind
[00:49:19.220]of tongue-in-cheek play with that I
[00:49:23.180]came across this image here that the the photograph of the headdress with the
[00:49:28.400]drum came from an old dictionary and I was kind of baffled by the fact that it
[00:49:35.480]was the illustration for the word of the word tom-tom and I thought wow we don't
[00:49:41.840]call a drum a tom-tom you know that's that's a European construct and then
[00:49:49.160]what we see is kind of this almost like a Lakota like image
[00:49:53.120]but that drum looks much more like a coachety drum in a sense and and sort
[00:49:59.900]of working with that how I kind of gather my source material this is I keep
[00:50:10.940]a plastic inflatable globe I've got several of them in my studio and I can
[00:50:17.800]deflate it and I can like twist and move the border
[00:50:23.060]and boundaries any way that I want and and and I think the fact that that when
[00:50:32.240]you do that it's an expression about trying to to change the world that you
[00:50:39.380]live in in a sense like the the painting of a Keith say that I showed you earlier
[00:50:44.720]if you noticed I omitted the the border between Kansas and Oklahoma and that was
[00:50:51.340]a very intentional decision
[00:50:53.000]I take this globe and I'm twisting and I'm turning it and I'm putting South
[00:50:58.620]America next to North America and doing that I'm kind of a luddite I tend to
[00:51:05.400]really struggle with technology I simply take my phone and I photograph it and
[00:51:15.500]then I put it in Photoshop and I meticulously clean it up and within a race
[00:51:22.940]tool and someone asked me how did you get your layers and I said I printed out
[00:51:27.320]on a piece of transparent acetate and I set it on top of my xerox copy and then
[00:51:34.280]I scan it and that's how I deal with things and but also what happens and I
[00:51:41.360]like about that process is is that it still keeps the hand involved in the
[00:51:49.520]working that sometimes there's artifacts that happen
[00:51:52.880]in there and and I have to kind of navigate and work around them and so
[00:51:57.980]what you see are these kind of constructed maps that I've done you know
[00:52:03.080]right over you know here and so so so that becomes the basis for a lot of the
[00:52:10.260]work I do a lot of collage and and what I find fascinating about collage is like
[00:52:19.040]I'll take an image of that elk or maybe
[00:52:22.820]a lunchbox you don't or a top or a tree and as you're moving that image
[00:52:31.760]across like this this field like this map it's about finding place I was
[00:52:38.660]telling a story one time it's like when I cut out like these elk images like
[00:52:44.060]you're sort of seeing in the middle of this print it's like as that exacto
[00:52:49.280]blade goes across the back of the elk where my
[00:52:52.760]is that is actually the hills at home and I'm thinking about those hills it's
[00:53:00.160]really kind of a pay step thing you know once I get all these things I begin to
[00:53:04.340]move them around usually when I'm doing printmaking I'll make anywhere
[00:53:09.100]sometimes close to 20 collages and I may only use five of them you know in the
[00:53:15.860]end but I'm fascinated with the variations I do a lot of work with a
[00:53:20.780]printer named Mitchell Marty
[00:53:22.700]at Interbane Press in Santa Fe and so you kind of get a sense of how I'm
[00:53:28.580]working here we've been doing a lot of prints on on Kitikata paper and doing a
[00:53:36.620]lot of shinkale and so some of the things like in that that image that I
[00:53:41.000]showed you the third slide where you saw all the the the flying saucers and that
[00:53:46.740]we cut make sheets of these I just meticulously cut them out and then
[00:53:52.640]then in the process of printing and begin to kind of move things around to
[00:53:58.520]try to find the right place for you know for the image and and so it's a very
[00:54:06.000]kind of laborious activity this is another piece called new earth one of
[00:54:12.800]the things I found out about working on kitty caught a paper is that when I was
[00:54:17.120]doing and building up the print that as the print developed I could actually cut
[00:54:22.580]through the paper in a sense that I had a colleague at KU one time they looked
[00:54:27.960]at said how are you printing those really rich whites I said I'm not I'm
[00:54:33.260]taking the kitty caught a and I'm cutting a hole out and when we shinkle
[00:54:37.700]lay the kitty caught onto the the the the paper that's what we get is this
[00:54:44.460]really beautiful white and so I like the notion of like when you're you're
[00:54:49.160]painting I think as a painter sometimes we think about adding
[00:54:52.520]and building things but you also have to realize that sometimes it's about
[00:54:56.060]placing something behind you know and and looking at that this was a another
[00:55:03.860]piece called apparitions again kind of expanding to to that kind of making
[00:55:13.140]these references to the Americas we see the ship diagram we see that historic
[00:55:18.080]print that I was using and and
[00:55:22.460]working with that now this is a piece called alien onslaught and again you see
[00:55:31.500]the elk image and they're gonna run through a few more of these real quick
[00:55:37.380]this is a piece called new landscape a few years back was invited to be a
[00:55:52.400]part of a project that was being made in a show called rewriting history and
[00:55:58.400]and this was a work that was made for that exhibit and and it was really about
[00:56:08.380]the Cheyenne and Cherokee and a number of people who were sort of imprisoned at
[00:56:18.400]Fort Sill and then were moved to to Fort
[00:56:22.340]Sorda and and I was trying to think of something to do with this and and I
[00:56:28.120]ended up using this image of these Chiricahua children and and in the
[00:56:34.280]process of making the mixed-media print I decided to use correction fluid white
[00:56:39.900]out and and started thinking about the notion that we white out in a red
[00:56:47.040]marking pen because these children were all shipped to to Carlisle
[00:56:52.280]in Pennsylvania and it was funny on my trip I realized I accidentally drove
[00:56:57.200]right by Carlisle and to as well and so I kept on thinking about correction
[00:57:04.620]fluid and and and these marking pencils as being a very interim inter you know
[00:57:11.300]important part of making this work also you know you realize that this was like
[00:57:16.700]one of the first times of organized child trafficking in many
[00:57:22.220]ways and then finally I've got another piece here this is a little over ten
[00:57:31.040]years ago about 11 years now NL basically installed 84 turbines on our
[00:57:41.180]land and they were told that they had to negotiate with the Osage tribe because
[00:57:46.460]we own the mineral rights basically the corporation did not do anything
[00:57:52.160]they just simply put up the the wind turbines and one of the things that
[00:57:58.760]happened was is that they dug up the limestone and crushed it and they used
[00:58:08.400]it as fill for the foundations for the wind turbines which that constituted
[00:58:13.640]mining and in the state of Oklahoma we basically lost every case when it went
[00:58:21.200]to the Tenth Circuit
[00:58:22.100]court we won and we've been winning those cases ever since but the company's
[00:58:29.300]out of Italy and they stood the windmills are still up and they're
[00:58:33.740]basically not going to take them down they're pretty much ignoring you know
[00:58:38.960]these federal court decisions and so we're dealing with all of these sort of
[00:58:44.700]wind turbines on our home and one of the things that for me it's like when I'm
[00:58:50.160]looking at them those turbines
[00:58:52.040]they're really a violation you know to us they also interrupt that relationship
[00:58:59.720]between earth and sky and so so this is something that that's kind of is is a
[00:59:08.420]work that I'm sort of fascinated with the notion of green energy our green
[00:59:14.000]colonialism that these corporations can come on the indigenous land and just
[00:59:18.680]almost do what they want and and
[00:59:21.980]it sort of supposedly it's for the good but it's not really for the good for us
[00:59:27.080]and and it's an issue that we're currently kind of dealing with at this
[00:59:32.220]point anyway that's my last slide for this evening and I want to thank you for
[00:59:39.440]for being here and I would be happy to answer any questions
[00:59:51.920]would you talk about the significance of the lunchbox it's a curious one to me
[01:00:16.220]like to know what what your thoughts are when you're using that I would
[01:00:21.860]share a story okay when I was in graduate school the students kept on
[01:00:30.020]asking me how come I wasn't painting works about that were native and I kept
[01:00:36.600]on they I kept on thinking oh they're looking for feathers beads and bones
[01:00:39.980]something like that and one time I kind of got tired of it so I made a painting
[01:00:44.840]of a lunchbox and we were having this critique and I
[01:00:49.360]remembered I've made a comment I said yeah I painted
[01:00:51.800]something from home this is something we use at home and and they were just
[01:00:58.040]like uh-huh yeah and finally I went I said this is how I express it I said the
[01:01:05.040]exterior it's a lunchbox the exterior is is pressed metal these clothes are made
[01:01:12.920]you know like this I said but what's inside it is Osage
[01:01:16.420]you can't see that and you don't recognize that and one of the things
[01:01:21.740]I'll sort of say to that I think is important I work a lot with with these
[01:01:27.540]stories from home I'm also very conscious that that some information is
[01:01:32.660]not meant to be shared and and it's a fine line that I look at you deal with
[01:01:40.560]this I always think about someone told me many years ago they said some people
[01:01:43.760]use tradition to keep people in place and some people use tradition to move
[01:01:50.540]people forward
[01:01:51.680]and and that's always kind of intrigued me that this the imagery and the
[01:01:58.600]narratives and the stories I'm working with as an artist there are personal
[01:02:04.700]expression they come from home but what I'm trying to do is to utilize them to
[01:02:10.140]help me understand the world I'm living in today that particular symbol comes
[01:02:15.620]from home that I found I've actually been quiet about not explaining how we
[01:02:20.600]use it
[01:02:21.620]because it's cultural information that needs to really kind of be kept private
[01:02:26.540]it's funny and I'll share share this with you
[01:02:30.800]it's like there were times in my life as I've talked about work that I found I
[01:02:36.920]was sharing more and more information and sometimes I would come into a hall
[01:02:41.860]like this and I would look and I'm going yes I feel really comfortable about
[01:02:45.980]talking about these issues are these points and there's other times where
[01:02:51.560]I've looked and I said I'm a little uneasy what I found particularly after
[01:02:57.740]covin when we started shifting to doing more things on zoom and realizing almost
[01:03:04.400]every talk was being recorded and that that the potential for it being online I
[01:03:11.120]found I actually began self censoring a lot of what I was saying and as an
[01:03:17.000]artist I constantly go through this process of censoring myself
[01:03:21.500]there's times where I really want to make a painting and use a certain symbol
[01:03:27.020]I'm going no I can't do that you know and and so the lunchbox is one of those
[01:03:33.980]things that I would just say we use it at a certain way at home that it's
[01:03:38.000]significant okay any other questions I know I mean thanks so much for sharing
[01:03:46.100]so much of your art today and yourself your mother did she have
[01:03:51.440]what was her experience was she simultaneously rejected and loved by
[01:03:55.700]both I think it was culture shock for her and because she remembered of the
[01:04:02.520]first thing she did was cook with my grandma Eva and she remembered one time
[01:04:08.520]having to butcher and that was completely out of her league and she
[01:04:14.180]would talk about that and I you know that was just yeah
[01:04:21.380]and and I think you know there was this relationship there that was good I mean
[01:04:27.980]she tried you know I mean she she not and she's always been one of us you she
[01:04:34.160]was always one of these people she kind of knew her boundaries you know she came
[01:04:40.060]and she did when she things when she needed to do them but but it was
[01:04:43.760]definitely very much a culture shock yeah it was funny I share some of these
[01:04:49.520]stories I
[01:04:51.320]remember I was talking to my older cousins I said you know I remember when
[01:04:54.160]I was a little kid when we were driving from town to Grayhorse that that we
[01:04:59.060]would pick up terpens and I got to play with the terpens for a day and then the
[01:05:04.640]next day we ate them and they were just roasted in the oven and so so we have
[01:05:12.260]these terpens like on a plate and you just pull the leg off and whatever and
[01:05:16.820]cracked it open and you ate it and and that was kind of
[01:05:21.260]my experience you know there and that was sort of her experience yeah and but
[01:05:27.000]it was very much I think you know it was something really new for her yeah
[01:05:35.180]yes
[01:05:39.520]Norman thank you for that really great talk and all these images that you showed
[01:05:51.200]us you know from span of your career and I I was curious I saw that there was
[01:05:59.000]this motif of almost like a fan barrier made with rope kind of rope tied
[01:06:06.700]together yes would you be able to elaborate on I what that stands for in
[01:06:14.080]your work or what that represents for you it's a snare I mean basically that is
[01:06:21.140]just like a net and and it's it's one of the images I've used you know quite a
[01:06:28.220]bit and it kind of makes a reference to is a net that all life exists under and
[01:06:35.120]it also has this kind of interesting visual relationship you know to the maps
[01:06:40.620]you know and yeah and to as well but yeah the other questions
[01:06:51.080]yes
[01:06:53.740]I was curious to hear a little bit more about like I'm an alum from Temple as
[01:07:09.060]well I was wondering how you like working with is Donna Nelson or Amzie
[01:07:15.440]Emmons like being in in North Philadelphia at Temple like
[01:07:21.020]how how does that environment influence some of the iconography that you're
[01:07:29.960]using or thinking about and kind of percolating on and also being in the
[01:07:37.820]lineage of you know or a new residency of Edgar like how how how does that
[01:07:49.580]influence your you know
[01:07:50.960]it's such an honor to be under Edgar heap of birds and yeah you know I think
[01:07:59.240]I'm still processing that a bit you know as I said you saw a few of the paintings
[01:08:03.980]that came from the residency the Liberty Bell painting you know I talked about
[01:08:08.240]the Rising Sun I kept on going walking around the city and finding you know
[01:08:14.960]different things that that I wanted to bring into the painting and
[01:08:20.900]I don't want to say that's sort of superficial but in a way you know that
[01:08:26.360]they were things that I could latch on to I'm still thinking about how the
[01:08:30.980]experience of being on the East Coast for five months and working is going to
[01:08:36.020]impact the future work I do think about the notion of how place and environment
[01:08:43.900]impacts us and and as I said we'll just you know I'm just I'm
[01:08:50.840]still kind of curious it's funny I've not been doing any printmaking since
[01:08:55.840]I've been at Tyler and one of my goals right now is to make a transition back
[01:09:01.500]into painting more so than printmaking I started printmaking oh 15 years ago
[01:09:09.720]pretty rigorously just to kind of keep up with my research activities at the
[01:09:15.380]University and what started off as doing prints that were going to be studies
[01:09:20.780]potential for painting I just found a life in them that that's where I'm
[01:09:24.500]focused I think it's time to make a transition I mean one of the things that
[01:09:30.540]I did speak to the people about Tyler is that I need an extended period of time
[01:09:35.480]to make paintings because I have to reassess what the future is going to be
[01:09:40.640]like for me by being in a new environment that's going to kind of I'm
[01:09:47.000]going to use the word disrupt but it's going to change how I'm looking
[01:09:50.720]at the world even that painting when I looked at did that map that map is
[01:09:55.880]something that I've been using an awful lot but the map when it was in put in
[01:10:00.800]the Liberty Bell painting all of a sudden I looked at they call it in
[01:10:06.420]Oklahoma linnipa instead of linnipi and I started looking at that oh wait a
[01:10:12.840]second here's the connection between the Philip you know the East Coast and
[01:10:16.940]Oklahoma and I started becoming more aware of the migration
[01:10:20.660]path you know of indigenous people outside of just the Osage but but I you
[01:10:29.440]know I I'm not for sure completely where it's going to go but I'm excited about
[01:10:35.100]that I I have to say is you know working with this visual vocabulary for so long
[01:10:41.900]I've hit a point in life where and I was I had the pleasure of having dinner with
[01:10:49.580]my thesis chair
[01:10:50.600]a few years back and I told this to earlier and and he told me about my
[01:11:01.240]admissions portfolio from 1988 and he knew it it wasn't like his memory was
[01:11:10.380]incredible and he started speaking about I asked well and you know I had the
[01:11:15.740]luxury of finally asking well what did you really think of me as a student
[01:11:20.540]and he made a comment that I thought was interesting he said he said you came to
[01:11:25.780]the school with a deep emotional intelligence and he said you painted
[01:11:32.360]from your feet up you know he said you weren't just engaged in theory he said
[01:11:40.300]that's how you worked and he said I saw this depth in there and over the course
[01:11:46.800]of the evening we had this beautiful conversation he took
[01:11:50.480]me to his studio he's in his early 80s mid 80s now showed me his two watercolor
[01:11:56.660]stations he would paint here and he would paint here and he was engaged in
[01:12:03.500]making and I remembered leaving and emailing him the next day and I said
[01:12:08.780]thank you I said you just made me realize how important life is and that
[01:12:17.660]as you move
[01:12:20.420]towards your latter years I mean I'm getting close to retirement but I'm not
[01:12:25.520]retiring from painting I have to figure out a way to to to rethink what painting
[01:12:35.200]is to me so that the conversation is new that I'm not falling back on something
[01:12:41.100]that I know being in Philadelphia being in Tyler the East Coast that's
[01:12:48.180]repositioning how I look at
[01:12:50.360]what I'm doing I told a story one time I said I it's amazing how you learn things
[01:12:58.440]I mean like this show being an older artist who's showing with a younger
[01:13:02.960]artist that's an honor because each generation I think of people of in
[01:13:11.440]particularly I remember being at IAEA and I was looking at TC Cannon and Earl Biss
[01:13:17.580]and Kevin Red Star and we acknowledged
[01:13:20.300]them as artists but now I'm not going to do that you know that each generation
[01:13:26.540]has their own vision like I showed that diagram my grandma would see that
[01:13:31.880]diagram she would understand it differently than my father and my father
[01:13:35.900]would understand it differently than I would but we were all related to it and
[01:13:40.520]so my goal really is just to kind of push this kind of new conversation and
[01:13:48.140]see where it goes
[01:13:50.240]yeah you like yes it was kind of personal so if you don't want to answer
[01:14:00.020]this okay perfectly okay do you still go to the Catholics and to the Native
[01:14:06.080]American Church and do those things find their way into your imagery oh no I'll
[01:14:16.700]leave it at that my my grandma my other grandma
[01:14:20.180]who was a sage when she was sick I would go you know I did that because of
[01:14:26.280]her you know and and that's how I look at things and then when she passed I
[01:14:31.640]just you know I kind of kind of stopped it doesn't mean that I'm not spiritual
[01:14:37.520]you know in a sense but but that's just just where I'm at yeah yes
[01:14:50.120]do you do you maintain a studio at home and also at KU or do you have both or
[01:14:59.520]where do you prefer to work or I and how does your work change in your in
[01:15:03.680]different places you know I have both I work both at KU but I've also got a
[01:15:09.440]studio in Oklahoma and and so it's just I work wherever I'm at I mean that's
[01:15:16.880]just yeah yeah I mean I like being in Oklahoma
[01:15:20.060]and painting I'm not totally for sure I really don't know if I can answer that
[01:15:32.900]because I think so much of my work kind of deals with this kind of transit
[01:15:36.920]transition from place you know I'm looking at that that drive home is
[01:15:42.680]always exciting to me I mean in many ways because it's a
[01:15:46.600]reminder of our history but also it's a beautiful
[01:15:50.000]connection to place and even though you know Kansas and well Nebraska all of it
[01:15:55.640]this agrarian society where everything has been changed the landscape has
[01:15:59.600]changed every once in a while look and I'll see a point on the landscape and
[01:16:04.240]I'm going that's been there for a long long time and I know that that my
[01:16:09.320]ancestors saw that you know and and having those kind of connections I think
[01:16:15.720]are important I heard something one time someone came together
[01:16:19.940]KU and they made a comment they were doing work with with children in Chiapas
[01:16:27.020]and she said she said I asked the kids I said how do you know home and one kid
[01:16:37.280]responded and they said I know home through my feet and the minute I heard
[01:16:43.280]that it just hit me so hard and I went oh I know home
[01:16:49.880]through my feet I know what it's like to step off of the porch at Grayhorse to
[01:16:56.840]walk down the gravel road to cross the paved road to walk again across this
[01:17:04.100]gravel lot and I know what it's like to step into the Arbor on that dirt and I
[01:17:11.540]can just rethink it the whole movement and then I go go I also remember
[01:17:19.820]what it was like to do that 35 years ago that's the connection to home that's a
[01:17:29.360]connection to earth you know and you know when we're walking we take home
[01:17:35.940]with us but but you know yeah and you know that's yeah thank you so much thank
[01:17:48.920]you
[01:17:49.760]yeah
[01:17:52.760]yeah
[01:17:55.760]Thank you.

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Hixson-Lied Visiting Artist: Norman Akers

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