Michael Aakhus

Michael Aakhus draws upon travel, Mesoamerican civilization, magical realism, and personal history to construct an expansive visual mythology. Working across printmaking, painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, artist books, poetry, and digital art, he treats artistic practice as a way of connecting fields of knowledge that are too often studied in isolation.

Aakhus grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, where his father operated a lodging and sawmill business. Museums, galleries, and opera were absent from his immediate surroundings, but other forms of cultural discovery were readily available. The wilderness and a nationally designated wild river passed through the farm, establishing an early relationship with landscape. His grandfather’s collection of National Geographic magazines introduced distant places and cultures, inspiring a lasting interest in travel.

Music offered a more private form of escape. An old phonograph stood in his closet alongside a collection of classical and opera recordings given to him by his grandmother’s sister. Because no one else wanted to hear them, he closed the closet door and listened alone for hours.

Art entered his life without a single defining event. Aakhus drew on any available surface, including homework margins and pieces of birch bark gathered from the forest. He imagined the bark as material for ancient scrolls and filled it with his own version of runic writing. These early activities already connected nature, history, language, and invention.

As a shy child, Aakhus understood that he was different from those around him. His growing awareness of his sexuality intensified that feeling. Two close childhood friends, a Native American boy named Sunny and an effeminate boy named Jimmy, were explicitly discouraged by a teacher who considered them inappropriate companions. Experiences such as these would later inform the questions of identity, gender, sexual orientation, and social authority present in his work.

College became a period of liberation. Studio art and art history were joined by philosophy, archaeology, world history, literature, and music. Just as importantly, Aakhus found people with whom he could debate politics, religion, and ideas. He initially planned to earn an education degree and teach high school art, but a sculpture professor encouraged him to pursue graduate study at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

There, Aakhus studied printmaking, painting, and drawing, eventually earning an MFA. He declined a teaching position at the University of Missouri-Kansas City after receiving a fellowship from the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. The fellowship provided a year in which to develop his work, culminating in a solo exhibition at the Roswell Museum and Art Center.

While in Roswell, Aakhus traveled outside the United States for the first time, visiting Mexico City to see the Indigenous art and architecture he had studied in graduate courses on Mesoamerican art history. Later, while teaching at the University of Southern Indiana, he taught the subject himself and led student tours for sixteen years to sites across Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, and Peru.

These encounters became central to his iconography. The Maya earth tree appears throughout his work as a model of the three-part cosmos: roots extending into the underworld, a trunk occupying the earthly realm, and branches reaching toward the celestial world. Related figures include the snake, capable of entering the underworld; the jaguar, associated with kingship and the forest; and the quetzal, connected to the celestial realm. The tree also becomes an image of the Milky Way rising from the underworld and extending across the night sky.

Aakhus does not reproduce this imagery as an archaeological exercise. He adapts its symbolic structures to form a personal mythology, one through which cultural history and individual experience can enter the same work.

Latin American magical realism has provided another important framework. Aakhus cites writers Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, as well as artists Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington. He is less interested in borrowing their imagery or techniques than in understanding the ideas that motivated their work. Their ability to place the historical, psychological, spiritual, and fantastical within a shared reality has influenced the conceptual breadth of his practice.

That breadth is deliberate. “Unlike other academic fields where you are rewarded for concentrating in narrow fields of research, artists have the opportunity to look at the big picture,” Aakhus observes. His movement among media allows a subject to be reconsidered through different physical and intellectual processes. A photograph may become the basis of a painting, print, or digital composition, while an exchange with a writer may develop into an artist book.

Travel remains a major source of material. Aakhus photographs landscapes, Indigenous markets, architecture, interiors, water, flowers, and people, then brings those images into the studio to be transformed. The original photograph acts as a record of experience, but the finished work is not limited to documentation. It becomes part of a larger symbolic structure.

His daily routine begins simply: a shower, a cup of matcha, and the studio. He usually starts working around ten in the morning and continues until midnight, sometimes later when a project is nearing resolution. Multiple works may remain active at once. He puts one aside, returns to another, and allows time to change how he sees each piece. A work may wait for several hours or several years before the necessary solution becomes apparent.

“I cannot be idle,” he says. “To be happy I must be in my studio exploring new ideas.”

Aakhus does not describe himself as experiencing creative blocks. When a process becomes formulaic, he changes it. Painting may give way to photography or digital work. At other times, he leaves the studio to tend his garden, pull weeds, or walk the dog. Boredom is treated as a signal that the method needs to be disrupted.

Collaboration has played a particularly important role in his artist books. Aakhus has worked with poets, playwrights, art historians, archaeologists, and linguists, using these partnerships to extend the intellectual range of individual projects. Practical difficulties with printers and binders eventually led him to take greater control of production. He learned bookbinding and developed alternatives, including screen-fold presentations, that allowed the form of each project to respond more directly to its content.

He is currently collaborating with a poet and linguist on a sequence of broadsides combining image and text. In one exchange, Aakhus provides an image and his collaborator writes a poem. The process is then reversed: she supplies a poem and he creates an image. The resulting works will be developed into a unified set for exhibition.

Aakhus expects his art to contain more information than any viewer will fully recover. He does not regard this as a barrier. “I expect my audience to bring their own experiences to the artwork and discover something that has personal meaning to them.” Interpretation becomes an encounter between the work’s layered sources and the viewer’s own knowledge.

Completing a body of work and installing it in an exhibition remains among the most fulfilling parts of his practice. Only within the gallery does he see the individual pieces become a coherent statement across the walls. He does not attempt to measure his own success, leaving that task to critics and scholars. His concern is endurance. He hopes the work will survive changing tastes and remain in institutions that will preserve, study, and share it.

Maintaining that independence has required practical decisions. Aakhus avoids commissions because they can shift authority toward committees or individual patrons. Financial stability has allowed him to resist trends and the pressure of dealers who might prefer his work to move in a more marketable direction. The final outcome must remain on his own terms.

For Aakhus, art and personal life continually shape one another. He has collaborated with his partner on artist books, with both learning through the process. Outside the studio, he travels, attends concerts and opera, tends a productive garden and fruit trees, cooks, preserves food, entertains friends, and welcomes visiting artists and writers. He collects stories, photographs midcentury glass, renovates his home, walks through the woods, and listens to records. These activities are not separate from his creative practice. They continually replenish it.

His present projects extend the concerns that have guided his work across decades. A recent solo exhibition, Magical Realism, at the McCutchen Art Center Pace Galleries brings together one dimension of this continuing inquiry. He is also developing Boys and Their Blasters, a series examining representations of male violence across popular culture, mythology, and history through questions of gender and sexual orientation.

Aakhus’s advice to younger artists reflects the structure of his own life: remember what matters, protect time in the studio, share the work, and do not allow significant opportunities to pass. His final instruction is even simpler: “Follow your bliss, and who knows where the joy of doing what you love will take you.”